Philip Speakman

Petrichor Project

sound for radio

13:22 minutes

2021​

 

In Petrichor Project, we travel amongst the phantom pastoral landscape of a future drowned Norfolk. Voices, sounds and memories unmoored in the deluge swirl amongst the tides and shifting silt banks. The natural and the artificial intermingle; facts seem strange, fictions undo history and an unruly nature colonises the mind.

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Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Petrichor Project imagines the Norfolk Broads as a premonition of what East Anglia might look like in a future of rising sea levels and uncertain futures. The work uses storytelling, field recording, interviews and music to explore the strange history of the Broads and the eerier agency of capital and fossil fuels in intimate and uncanny ways.

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The work explores the relationship of people to landscapes like the Broads, asking if the landscape is a product of us or we a product of the landscape. The work places the Broads in a global network of sights affected by fossil fuel extraction, and pushes towards the uncomfortable question of what a close connection with nature might look like in a time of ecological collapse.

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Commissioned for 'New Creatives' and supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts.

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Played on BBC 6 Music, Introducing Arts on 9/5/22

 

Philip Speakman - Director, Writer, Sound Designer

Tom Moore - Sound Designer, Sound Engineer

Misha Faulty - Musician 

Helle Marie Tviberg - Narrator

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Mixed by Tom Moore at Slow Worm Records, Norfolk

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