Siyanda Kobokana is a PhD candidate in Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He is the laureate of a call organized by ArteC, Fiminco, and the French Institute of South Africa His research investigates the relationship between sound, climate crisis, and media technologies in post-apartheid South Africa. Through this work, he asks how marginalised communities listen to climate change—not only as data or disaster, but as lived history, as grief, and as everyday experience.

His project, Ecological Listening: A Sonic Method for Climate Justice from the Margins, explores how sound—especially community radio, ambient recordings, and oral storytelling—can serve as a decolonial method to rethink climate justice. The research draws from fieldwork in KwaZulu-Natal, where recurring floods have exposed both infrastructural neglect and the resilience of grassroots communication networks.

He traces the sounds that circulate during ecological crises—voice notes, radio updates, the hum of flooded streets—and ask what they reveal about the politics of attention and survival. These sounds hold memory, resistance, and knowledge often ignored in mainstream ecological frameworks. In this way, listening becomes both method and metaphor—a means of making audible the otherwise erased.

During the residency, in Fondation Fiminco (oct-dec.2025) he will begin developing a multichannel sound installation titled When the Waters Speak, which brings together these sonic fragments into an immersive space for reflection. This project situates itself as a critique of the dominant climate narratives born out of the Paris Agreement, asking: who gets to define ecological futures, and who is asked to remain silent?

By bridging South–South and South–North knowledge practices, this project contributes to a wider rethinking of the ecological from an African perspective. It seeks not only to challenge the visual dominance of climate discourse but to imagine climate listening as a new pathway for justice, empathy, and co-survival.

Affiliation: University of the Western Cape (PhD Candidate, Historical Studies)

Location of Fieldwork: KwaZulu-Natal and Mthatha, South Africa