Nandita Kumar – Sounding the Invisible: An Elegant Symbiosis (2025)
Residency Host: TBA21
Sounding the Invisible: An Elegant Symbiosis explores phytoremediation—the use of plants and their microbiomes to cleanse environments—as both a scientific method and an artistic provocation. Positioned within the Venetian Lagoon, a site burdened with pollutants from industrial, agricultural, maritime, and urban activity, the project integrates artistic practice, scientific inquiry, and data sonification to reimagine sustainable relationships with ecology. It functions simultaneously as experiment, installation, and learning tool, inviting communities to engage environmental data through sensory, playful, and participatory encounters that culminate in an emergent, chance-driven composition.
Structured in three parts—a sculptural installation, an interactive sound environment, and a digital archive—the work connects two distinct data streams. The first arises from vernacular herblore, prompted by the artist’s encounter with native weeds in Goa and their phytoremediative potential. The second derives from pollutants recorded in the Venetian Lagoon. Visually, the installation combines UV printing with PCB-like copper cut-outs of local phytoremediation plants, anchored within three borosilicate terrariums—miniature biospheres reminiscent of ships in bottles—that generate the ambient aqueous soundscape permeating the space. A parallel display of 36 reagent bottles, each corresponding to a pollutant, employs QR codes to trigger shifts in sound while revealing scientific and botanical details on mobile devices.
“Sounding the Invisible” uncovers hidden ecological entanglements and envisions symbiotic futures, through an interactive design, fostering playful, community-driven learning that engages audiences with a QR code activated web-based archive that harnesses phytoremediation a plant-based strategies for ecological restoration and catalyzing a sound installation transforming imperceptible pollutants in the venice lagoon into tangible experiences.
– Nandita Kumar
Sonically, the piece layers frequencies tied to water states with field recordings from Venice’s wetlands, San Servolo, and Porto Marghera. Pollutant “signatures” are derived from their enthalpy of formation, mapping molecular properties into audible frequencies. As visitors interact, pollutants’ hidden presences overlay the ambient track, evoking their insidious seepage into waterways. The accompanying web app extends this dialogue, highlighting medicinal, nutritional, and ecological roles of plants alongside their capacity for remediation, reframing bioremediation and food fortification as mutualistic processes.
Framed by Charles Darwin’s early observation of root intelligence in The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), the project underscores how slowly our recognition of plant perceptivity has entered science. By amplifying plant intelligence and ecological agency, Sounding the Invisible challenges speciesist epistemologies, proposing plants as collaborators in repairing consumption-driven ecological degradation. Rooted in Venice yet globally resonant, it calls on audiences to imagine and design plant-based solutions for pollutants in their own local ecologies.
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy as part of the STARTS4Water II residency program of the European Commission. With the initial support of ASU Leonardo Imagination Fellowship, UNESCO FUTURE Literacy, and The Awesome Foundation.
Sound Design: Kari Rae Seekins Creative Coder for Sound Engagement: Abhinay Khoparzi Circuit Board Design: Prateek Jha Website Developer: Aryan Oberoi | Md. Anas Jamal Ui / Ux Design: Sanjana Kadam Labels / Poster; Design: Aviral Saxena Plant Illustrations: Nandita Kumar | Akshay Manjrekar | Snigdha Vaidya Pollutant Illustrations: Priyanka Bagade Book Design: Shikha Sinai Usgaonker 3D Model for Sculpture/Installation: Athul Kumar Editor: Anjali Singh Uttamchandani Researcher and Content Writer: Pooja Das Introduction Text: Adwait Researchers: Kamakshi Garg, Dhruvika Sharma, Sristi Pareskar, Tamoghno Paul, Mithun Lakshmanan, Prajakta Bodkhe, Nezlyn D’Souza.
Images credits Nandita Kumar, Sounding the Invisible: An Elegant Symbiosis, interactive installation, at the TBA21 Solstice Festival, June 2025, Ocean Space, Venice. Organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of S+T+ARTS4WaterII, an initiative by the European Commission. Photo: Enrico Fiorese The artistic residencies are organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4Water II residency program with the support of Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschung (KDM) within the Prep4Blue project as a contribution to the EU Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030, and with the collaboration of Ca’ Foscari, CNR-ISMAR, ETT, and Venice International University.
About Nandita Kumar
Nandita Kumar (India and New Zealand) is a creative systems designer working at the intersection of art, environmental science, technology, and community to create interactive installations. Using sound, video, animation, performance, custom motherboards, sensors, and apps, she crafts sensory narratives that reflect tensions between the industrial and natural worlds. Her research-driven projects explore data, its representation, and new methods of engaging audiences, with a focus on sustainable development that integrates ecological resilience and social well-being. Through poetic explorations of human–machine relationships, her works integrate media and materiality to connect self, body, community, and ecology. By locating patterns of sustainability, hybridity, and technological synergy with urban nature, her projects foster community, critical reflection, and equitable access to knowledge. She has shown at Ars Electronica, Pompidou, ZKM, KIASMA, LACMA, REDCAT, ISEA, Jeu de Paume, KNMA, and more, and has received fellowships from DAAD, Asu Leonardo, and S+T+ARTS @ TBA21.
This residency invited artists to explore the Venice Lagoon’s food production and distribution networks, using the interplay of cooking, eating, and waste management to inspire imaginative scenarios that highlight interspecies alliances, crucial trade routes, and conviviality.
Keywords
metabolism, reciprocity, conviviality, energy matter, bio hacking, open-source synthetic alternatives, AI enhanced food
Description of the regional challenge
The activity of ports has an essential influence on our everyday meals. For centuries, its intense activities indicated trade routes and portrayed economic positions. Nowadays, the sustainability of port activities reveals the interdependencies between human bodies and the planetary body at large. The crucial role of food for life provides a unique scope to interrogate the metabolic cycles on which the food supply depends.
Observing ports as metabolic bodies able to process the arrival of new species and ingredients can enhance interspecies alliances. Salt built a golden economy for the Venetian Republic as the primary traded good, enhancing the process of circularity that continues today. For example, the arrival of the Atlantic blue crab through ballast water has influenced the ecosystem, raising ecological concerns as well as troubling conversations about “invasive species.” What if conviviality occurs prior to human interactions at a table? What if the engrained aspects of sharing a meal, the joy, the enhancing sense of taste and smell, may reintroduce modes of encounters centreing cooperation all along the way: in the waters, in the ports, and at the table?
How is the mission S+T+ARTS driven?
We welcome proposals with a situated understanding of Venice and its ecosystem from an interspecies perspective, approaching aquatic ecosystems through artistic and practice-based research with nurturing visions of fair and sustainable futures. We encourage proposals that deploy technologies with ecocritical approaches towards technodiversity.
About The Project – Sounding the Invisible: An Elegant Symbiosis
Sounding the Invisible: An Elegant Symbiosis is an interactive graphical notation score/sound installation based on an experimental archive that collates information on Phytoremediation plants and the varied pollutants broken-down by these plants specifically in water bodies. This technique uses plants and the associated microorganisms, along with proper water amendments, to either contain, remove or render toxic contaminants harmless. These plants will be chosen in the hope that future ecologies can use this assimilated research to adopt these plants in their local spaces and discharge clean water before it re-enters the water system. It is a cost-effective plant-based approach of remediation, in which the chosen plants will be in response to the varied pollutants found in the ports of Venice.
This project leverages technology to translate complex scientific information into accessible auditory/visual/content cues, enhancing the audience’s understanding and engagement. By sonifying data on pollutants absorbed by Phytoremediation plants, the project invites participants to engage with the complexities of environmental issues. Embracing uncertainty/chance and richness of human experience, the project embodies creating live encounters where unexpected moments of learning unfold. By providing information about phytoremediation plants and pollutants, her installation fosters dialogue and encourages individuals to take action in their communities.
Jury Statement
“The artist has an interesting understanding of conviviality, intended beyond the human. The artist is fostering a holistic view of interspecies entanglements and aims at focusing on the pollution produced by the port. Exciting project and very well articulated methodology and considered impact through community engagement, advocacy and public debate. The pre-existing research is a valuable asset for the continuation of the project. A really excellent interpretation of sound as a multidimensional tool to promote inter-species, inter-societal, chemical, etc. communication. Well embedded in Venice – glass, science, pollution. Setting more concrete and feasible goals given the specificities of the locality of Venice’s wetlands for the next steps would be necessary, but overall, an inspiring potential. Also, excellent video presentation, we appreciated the care and time offered for the preparation of the interview.”
We use cookies to optimise our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
