SONIC ALLEGORIES
Sonic Allegories //
A collaborative project by Leena Lee and Robertina Šebjanič
This series of sound projects explores the sonic atmospheres of liminal spaces—those barely perceptible environments in transition, where margins, limits, and borders can be reimagined. Artists Leena Lee and Robertina Šebjanič have anchored their work in specific locations, uncovering the hidden sonic dimensions of these transformative spaces.
Their first sound art project, AviaAquatoCene, delves into the sonic landscape of the Cantera Oriente Reserve in Mexico City. The second project, TerraAstroCene, takes the form of a sonic walk through the Crómlech de los Almendros in Évora, Portugal.
The overarching series, SonicAllegories, captures phenomena related to the earth and the astral: bird songs, the rhythmic sounds of shrimp underwater, the resonances of ancient stars among megalithic stones, and now the sonic and symbolic properties of iridescent foam. These are spaces where nature reclaims territories once shaped by human intervention, revealing an interplay of presence and absence, like the rhythm of the sea as it appears and disappears along the shore.
Viewed through this lens, these transitional environments invite us to reconsider the boundaries between the synthetic and the organic, the tangible and the ephemeral, fostering new ways to listen and perceive the world around us.
AviaAquatoCene
Cantera Oriente Reserve of Mexico City
This third landscape is simultaneously the A3 buffer zone of the Pedregal de San Ángel Ecological Reserve, an ecological research laboratory at UNAM University, and a training site for the Pumas soccer team. Originally, the site was a quarry and asphalt plant that, after 25 years of exploitation, was discovered to contain a natural spring. When this was found in 1996, the plant was closed and handed back to the university, leaving a crevasse 16 hectares wide and 42 meters deep. Soil was then raised one meter above the asphalt to allow trees to grow. Today, it functions as an open laboratory for scientific research, managed by the Faculty of Science at UNAM.
Cantera Oriente contains four lakes and the natural spring. AviaAquatoCene is a sound piece composed of field recordings from this site. Each recording captures the essence of the place—air and water, the stories of what lies above and below.
TerraAstroCene
Crómlech de los Almendros, Evora, Portugal
The soundscapes of the Crómlech de los Almendros, the largest megalithic monument on the Iberian Peninsula, were recorded by the team at Cultivamos Cultura and composed into a sound walk by Lena and Robertina from a distance (Mexico City – Ljubljana – Évora). The composition explores the millennia-long presence of the monument. Dating back to the Neolithic era, the Crómlech de los Almendros has endured centuries of transformation, making its sonic presence particularly intriguing.
This monument is an homage to the threshold between planet Earth and the stars. The sound walk is presented both in the gallery and on-site at the Crómlech de los Almendros as a composition that reveals the liminal space bridging these worlds.