Manja Ristić’s work is deeply rooted to a process of unearthing and distilling memory as a process of mnemosonic construction. No single sound used in her work comes unsolicited, estranged from its own political, historical, geoantrhopological entanglements. In that sense, Ristić’s sonic sculpting is an attempt to create a form of archaeosonic tapestry of sonic simulacra in order to observe, empathise and ultimately understand what is at stake, what is threatened, what is lost and what is found in the memory of a place.
These explorations of place and memory become the main line of enquiry in her recent release titled Water Memory – mnemosonic topographies of the Adriatic. Taking as a starting point the place where she currently leaves and works, the island of Korčula in Croatia, Ristić employs various techniques of recording the field from the bottom up to expose her listeners, as she writes, “to relations between the sociology of time and the politics of soundscape as a possible interdisciplinary framework for a better understanding of the memory of place”.
In its 50 minutes of duration, the work transposes subtly enveloped electro-acoustic manipulations of various and at times contrasting sonic environments, interior, exterior, sub-aquatic, on the ground, in the air, all bound together through the running presence of water. Water becomes the enactor of the journey, a reminder that all once was water, and that in water, the natural finds its strength, its resilience, towards self-preservation, as Ristić highlights in the accompanying text.
Similarly, in her release titled Awakenings (Line, April 2023), water becomes the main driver behind a series of compositions made of field-recordings from her home-base in Korčula, Croatia, including, as we read in the press release, abandoned ex-Yugoslav military compound on the island of Korčula, ancient quarry on the island of Vrnik, the village of Račišće, Lumbarda ancient aquatorium, sound pollution of the water traffic in the Pelješac-peninsula channel, Ražnjić lighthouse; a musical playground in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Water is a form of awakening the natural against deterioration and negligence, and the dissipating whirls of water pollution, but also Ristić’s own way of withstanding the passage of time in place, of making her own personal imprint on the topographies she engages with.
Following a similar aesthetic approach to Water Memory, Awakenings offers a quite personal collection of recordings of water, infused with electro-acoustically treated sounds and movements, creating a testimony of listen[ing] to the space through other spaces, in a form of mnemosonic contruction; a contemplative but quite tangible journey through Ristić’s watery ears, a form of resistance and hope, perhaps, against the inexorability of the “tooth of time”, as she notes in her book Sonic Ontology of Negligence (CONA, Steklenik 2021). (Maria Papadomanolaki)
a closer listen 