SELECTED VIDEOS + INSTALLATIONS

 

Mas Presto Ven, Palomba
(dwelling project, London, 2022)

 
Mas Presto Ven, Palomba [Come Quicker, Dove] uses filmmaker and photographer Daniela Germade’s footage of her familial hometown: Fuengirola, Malaga (Andalucia). My visit to Daniela’s family home sparked this artistic collaboration. The film and sound interact as two perspectives on the place, from the point of view of guest versus dweller. This work was exhibited at ‘dwelling project’, London, in January 2023. 

I approached my sonic portrait of Fuengirola through field recordings made during the trip.  These recordings were inspired by discussions about the layers of migration that have shaped this place. Whilst dwelling with Dani’s family I reflected on the possible presence of my own Sephardic Jewish ancestors, who would have inhabited this area of the Iberian Peninsula before their expulsion in the late 15th century.

Over the last few years, I have been researching Sephardic folk music and recording my own versions of various Ladino songs with guitarist Ynys Barnard Masterson. One such song is incorporated into the end of this work – ‘La Rosa Enflorece’ – to represent the ghostly resonances of these diasporic dwellers in the contemporary sonic landscape, where industrial and organic sounds cohabit with Flamenco music and pop. The title of the piece is taken from ‘La Rosa Enflorece’ and is written in the Ladino transcription: a language which will soon become obsolete due to a lack of speakers in the younger generation of Sephardic Jews. The image of the dove being called by the song’s lament aligns with the work’s preoccupation with the avian lens of dwelling: the camera as a bird, the diaspora as migrating birds, making dwellings wherever they land.
 

Excavation Through Tuning 
(Wysing Arts Centre, 2022) 



A project created for Wysing Arts Centre during my time as an  AMPlify resident.
The final work was a video and miscellany. 

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎Miscellany︎︎︎

Sound and Radio Projects 


Studio and Editorial Assistant for Sonic Insurgency Research Group’s ‘Glossary of the Sonic Commons’, for Creative Time HQ. Read the Glossary here. 



Poetics of Listening, Radio Show on WXBC, September - December 2024 Selected Shows Here 



MOOAR Residency, ‘Sonic Ecosystems in Colombia’, September 2024, interviewing Leonel Vasquez, Diana Restrepo and Jorge Barco. Listen Here.  



‘Sonic Meditations’ [Curation] Event at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, Celebrating 50 years of Pauline Oliveros’ Legacy, October 2022. In conversation with Louise Gray and IONE. 

Cosmology of Internet Infrastructure, AfroGrids, Mozilla Green Screen Coalition Fund
‘The Art of Care’, Spacebar Magazine

“Conducting Empire: towards a genealogy of the internet’s backbone” in AfroGrids: Cosmology of Internet Infrastructure, Three Visions for Bridging the Digital Divide, eds. Esther Mwema 

Published Online, Funded by Mozilla Green Screen Coalition Fund

Also Featured in Branch Issue 9, Summer 2025. 





The ‘Cosmology of Internet Infrastructure' presents, in three chapters, imagery on society’s belief in the evolution of the (digital) world. The community-centred artwork and research by Esther Mwema connects increased ownership of internet infrastructure by big tech companie to (digital) colonialism, unveiling hidden systems of power in (digital) society. The ar component of the project features three cosmologies – past-present, transitory and future - illustrating visions of bridging the digital divide based on the articles written by three multi-faceted practitioners: Elinor Arden, Emsie Erastus, and Raymundo Vásquez Ruiz.

The past-present cosmology written by Elinor Arden reflects the colonial logic around internet infrastructure that shapes our current internet infrastructure landscape from 2024 and backwards to the era after the transatlantic slave trade.

The transitory cosmology written by Raymundo Vásquez Ruiz challenges engineers working within a digital ecosystem that is trying to right the wrongs of the past by adopting the concept of green technologies, along with its fallacies and potential.

The future cosmology by Emsie Erastus plants us in a digital ecosystem rooted in afro-feminist and decolonial logic, condemning the idolatry of big tech and shining  light on possible equitable futures, with tangible examples on how to get them. The five chapters end with a visioning of what the collective wants in a (digital) universe of competing cosmologies.


Afro-Grids is a creative storytelling project that uses African folklore as a methodology to deconstruct and explore the relationship between big tech’s ownership of African internet infrastructure and digital colonialism. The project marries decolonial scholarship and imaginative storytelling to reveal  the reality of undersea internet cables throughout the African continent.

 

The Art of Care 


Published in Spacebar Magazine, 2023 

Read for free here. 

‘Elinor Arden explores care as a transgressive performance through her experience as a performer at a recent Marina Abramovic show. She experiments with the act of translating bodily symbols onto the page. Describing the exhibition becomes a metaphor for the complex relationship between you (reader) and I (writer): the antipode of you (viewer) and I (performer)’ 
 

 

From 2020-2022, I was Music Director, Sound Designer and performer at Wringing Metamorphosis Dance Theater, who devise original dance theater productions. We performed at a range of venues, from Theater Peckham to the SERPENTINE.

With a background in devised performance art and dance-theatre, my most recent work has been based in lecture-performance and interactive sound installation.




Back to Earth: Queer Earth and Liquid Matters

(Serpentine, London, 2022) 

Sound design for Wringing Metamorphosis Dance Theatre collaboration with poet Bhanu Kapil, using field recordings made by artists in Istanbul and inspired by source text ‘HUMANIMAL’, by Bhanu Kapil. 

Omphalos
(Theatre Peckham, London, August 2022)


I designed sound and directed music, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Wringing Metamorphosis Dance Theatre, for this original production of OMPHALOS.
Read more about the production here. 

I also performed as part of the musical ensemble with Yasmin Rai, Ynys Barnard Masterson and Jessica Raja Brown.  

Skins of This Site
(OVADA, Oxford, 2023)


In a project commissioned by OVADA Gallery, Oxford (UK) I collaborated with artist Harriet Crisp to produce a site-specific project on the history of the OVADA warehouse. Skins of This Site is a cartographic print and a binaural soundscape.  Understanding the site as a conjunction of physical, metaphysical, and socio-political phenomena, we researched its history and spent time in the space, recording sound, taking photos, creating floor rubbings, and writing. Taking a particular interest in the warehouse’s use as a Hide and Skin market in the early 20th century, we began to think about the historic use of skin or vellum as a writing surface, and subsequently the metaphor of the palimpsest: a manuscript where writing has been rubbed away and the surface repurposed; something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This became a useful starting point in representing layered histories. The soundscape amplifies the visitor’s immediate experience of the space and incorporates sounds which excavate the site’s history as an Abbey, a graveyard and an industrial space. Visual traces of the site inform the accompanying paper ‘hides’.  Maps, photos, building plans, floor rubbings, and screen grabs of online sources are combined with sculptures made from old Oxford telephone directories.