Translating Silence, 2026

The installation stages translation as something fragile, interrupted, and exposed to environmental decline and technological mediation. The work features life-scale textile forms of a mother sperm whale and her calf suspended from the ceiling, alongside a video that imitates a speculative translation machine. The sonic environment contrasts the calf's codas, the rhythmic clicks vital to the pair's bond and survival, with the mother's silence.

This silence reflects how marine heatwaves, food scarcity, and noise pollution are forcing whales to prioritise survival over communication. As the audio plays, the machine attempts to render these signals into English as "speculative stutters", trying to grasp a fading signal. By placing the whale inside the frame of a "translation machine", the work shifts attention from what whales might be saying to what their silence and distress make visible.

Drawing on Mãori and Polynesian understandings of the whale as tohu (Mãori: sign, indication, or omen), it treats the whale as a diagnostic sign of the ocean's condition. Here, a thriving whale manifests the ocean's health, while its distress serves as an environmental alarm. The work asks: can a machine learn to read a tohu, or does technological mediation risk simplifying a profound Indigenous knowledge system into a mere data point?