wind through the water through the stone is an ambient AV installation built around the act of listening through spaces dense with history, placed within an environmental setting specific to the Adriatic micro-biome. Sound, as an entry point, reveals an elemental complexity formed through layers of nature’s composition——layers that operate on different temporal scales yet remain tightly bound and mutually dependent. Recorded with a sensitive JrF hydrophone lowered into a hollow of a natural sea pool at the edge of the rocky littoral, the self-generative composition listens to the sea as it moves through limestone sediments on a windy winter day in the South Adriatic.
Conceptual listening——through spaces, materials, and elemental forces——opens the possibility of a different sensorial experience. It allows us to step into the position of environmental agents, to sense the relational epistemology of interconnectedness and energetic interdependence within conditions that exceed the human.
On the other side of the spectrum of perception, the human presence embedded in this place is culturally charged: the sound was recorded in the backyard of painter and muralist Maksimilijan “Maxo” Vanka, who spent long stretches of his life on these same rocks, shaping the imagery that would later define him. Vanka, born in Zagreb in 1889 and later active between Croatia, Belgium, and the United States, carried within his work a deep sensitivity to injustice, displacement, and the fragile dignity of everyday life. His murals, most famously those in St. Nicholas Church in Millvale, Pennsylvania, are monumental testaments to the human condition, painted with an urgency that mirrors the elemental forces embodied in these very shores, in his Adriatic refuge. His legacy lingers as a quiet counterpoint, a reminder of how landscapes imprint themselves onto human vision and gesture.
The original sound piece was part of the collection Him, fast sleeping, soon he found / In labyrinth of many a round, self-rolled, a work that draws its conceptual frame from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The album explores the entanglement of wandering, enclosure, and self-emerging worlds seemingly lost within their own spirals. The concept unfolds as an internal labyrinth, where sound can be perceived as both a guide and an obstruction. A medium through which one confronts the limits of perception within the cyclical nature of searching for meaning. The collection suggests that meaning also may emerge through attentive, patient listening.
The visual aspect of wind through the water through the stone is reduced to a sensory impression: a shimmering light responding to the robust conditions of the winter sea. The fast-changing, tellurian colours amplify the suggestive state of an internalised, enclosed space. A space within, and between, wind and water, water and stone, wind and stone. Their coexistence leaves a unique energetic imprint, translated through textural amalgams. The question remains: can sound and light translate this imprint, or do they merely gesture toward something that ultimately resists specific translation?
Finally, the work proposes that sound could be perceived as a mnemonic force——a carrier of historical sediments, ecological tensions, and overlooked agencies. The installation opens a broader inquiry into how sound shapes our understanding of place, how it reveals the subtle negotiations between presence and absence, and how it allows us to investigate a specific biome as a remembering entity, and an ontology built through the apotheosis of muted signals in abandoned, neglected, or damaged ecosystems.
wind through the water through the stone is a minimalist encounter, a gentle meeting with the elemental, and a suggestive embodiment of the sound of the sea that has carried——and continues to carry——the quiet labour of tides, the erosion of stone, and the persistence of movement in water, by building an energetically potent environment through extreme temporal imparity.