Topophilia is a sonic installation with two ceramic vessels as listening devices for a place remembered but no longer accessible. Each vessel contains a speaker and transmits a personal archive of recordings made in a coastal Ukrainian city before its occupation. One carries muffled traces of human voices, the other environmental sounds; sea, cars, coal trains that defined the city’s sonic texture.​

The project’s title is connected to the notion of Topophilia, a term introduced by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan to describe the affective bond between people and place; the emotional and sensory ties that bond a person to their environment. In this work the emotional connection is sustained through sonic archives of a territory that no longer exists in the way it was once remembered.

The viewer is invited to come into proximity with the sonic vessels, which creates intimacy; listening through quiet muffled sound and vibration of personal memories. The vessels function as infrastructures for maintaining relation to a transformed geography. The Political and territorial rupture, memory are translated into a material listening practice. Sound becomes a way of maintaining a certain connection with a place when the possibility of going back has disappeared.