Sounds in the Wake is a photographic zine project that examines how dominant visual and scientific narratives have framed water as stable, transparent, and separate from histories of violence. Drawing on scholarship that critiques Western representations of nature and hydrosocial systems, the work questions traditions that render rivers as fixed lines, reduce water to technical cycles, or silence the sonic traces of colonial histories.¹²³⁴ At the centre of the project is Christina Sharpe’s concept of the wake, which understands water as a medium through which the afterlives of slavery persist and are felt in the present.⁵ Brandon LaBelle similarly suggests that sound can “instill sensitivity for what goes unheard,”⁶ a proposition that guides the project’s attention to submerged voice and vibration.

The work centres on photographing a speaker reciting a passage from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! underwater, producing a sequence of images in which each frame captures a fragment of speech. Inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theatre series, the zine translates poetry into visual rhythm, foregrounding distortion, refraction, and breath as material forces. Rather than presenting water as clear and controlled, the images emphasise its instability and resistance to aesthetic containment.

Positioned as a response to aesthetic traditions that idealise aquatic clarity, the project uses submersion, opacity, and sonic disturbance to propose an alternative visual language. Sounds in the Wake approaches water not as a neutral subject but as a medium shaped by historical conditions, asking how image-making might register what standard representations leave unseen or unheard.