In this episode, we talk with French field recordist and artist Mélia Roger about her film Dear Phonocene, currently featured in the Projected Ecologies program within the exhibition Pulsar at MUCA in Mexico City. Mélia shares how the work emerged from over a decade of listening to the monoculture Douglas fir plantations near her parents’ home, spaces she describes as “post-natural” and marked by biodiversity loss. Blending fiction, performance, and documentary, the project imagines “acoustic enrichment” as a form of care—playing back past soundscapes to acknowledge what has been lost. We discuss her collaboration with other women recordists, the role of human presence and “noisy non-self” in the film’s soundscape, and the interplay between slow listening and the fast pace of image-making. Mélia reflects on grief, hope, and tenderness in altered landscapes, the technical and ethical dimensions of playback, and her evolving research on post-natural listening within her PhD work. Plus, we hear about her upcoming explorations of cetacean sound in the Canary Islands.

Mélia Roger (*1996, she/her) is a field recordist and artist engaged to inspire ecological change with environmental and empathic listening. Her work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, searching for the invisible layers between human and non-humans. Coming from a sound engineering background (ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris, ZHdK in Zurich), Mélia is developing a twofold activity between immersive 7.0.2 sound recordings within HAL, as well as a more experimental and naturalistic approach to listening. Now at Le Fresnoy, she is a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of Lille, focusing on the relations between sound arts and acoustic ecology.
https://www.meliaroger.com/portfolio/project-two-llrgk-blz6c
https://www.instagram.com/meliarog/
https://muca.unam.mx/pulsar.html
https://www.lydianstater.co/projected-ecologies