Abstract 

This audio paper offers an autoethnographic engagement with both glaciers and the ideas-of-glaciers through acts of listening by Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta campaign members. The campaign relies upon artistic intervention as sociolegal innovation by nominating the glacier Snæfellsjökull for Iceland’s 2024 presidential race. A founding tenet of the collective’s working method is listening as a primary strategy to become-with glacier (að jökla). Through campaign members’ application of multimodal research approaches, the audio paper will conceptualise, describe, and demonstrate how listening forms an integral component of communicating with the more-than-human to speculate on possible future worldings. 

The paper goes beyond the concept of the »soundscape« as a wide and general metaphor (Ingold, 2007) seeking more meaningful and intimate relationships via sound, understood as a physical phenomenon of vibration, both audible and inaudible (Östersjö, et al., 2024). It questions the Western notion of music as a human (and) sonic practice, promoting listening as a creative act of becoming-with. The narrative and sonic structure of the audio paper is a building, layered unfolding – an ecomimicry of glacial becoming through flow, surge, thinning, thawing, recession, ablation, melt – where our prose outlines the palimpsestComparable to how palimpsests are archives for writing and revising, so too do glaciers compose and reconstitute the land. See Daughtry’s Acoustic Palimpsest. of Snæfellsjökull from its extent to its projected disappearance.  

Appendix: Jökull Phonology 

Collective members of Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta (Glacier for President) approach glacial relations through an ethos of að jökla (to become-with glacier). The neologism að jökla takes an Icelandic verb form and applies it to the word for glacier (jökull). This follows the behavior of Icelandic seasonal verbs such as að vora (to become spring) and að vetra (to become winter), signaling metamorphic transition as their action. The glacier-verb neologism traces transition; in the case of current usage, it implies a flux in mass, leaning heavily towards transitional disappearance. The creation of this action word also allows for the empathetic embodiment of glacier experiences (Rawlings, Counter-Desecration Anthology, 2018). 

When we pronounce jökull, we invite those inherited semiotic and embodied traces into our own bodies. The phonology (»Icelandic phonology« 2014) of jökull commences with a voiced palatal fricative (j), followed by front rounded low monophthong (ö). An unvoiced velar plosive (k) precedes the closed back high monophthong (u), and the word finishes with the pre-stopped, unvoiced lateral fricative (ll) (Gutman and Avanzati 2013). This combination produces a powerful explosion of minimal vowels connecting fricatives and unvoiced utterance. The word starts with a push, a force of voice through the mouth, and ends in the near-whisper of the dark »ll« – ominous synonymy when partnered with its signified abiotic entity.