04. At the Verge of Rootedness:
Echoes from the Printed Notation
Visual producer: Liangchen Sui
Performers: Willa Coode-Robins, Anna Routley, Liv Balchin
Special thanks to Iris Garrelfs and Improvisors’ Collective from the Department of Music at Goldsmiths
Performers: Willa Coode-Robins, Anna Routley, Liv Balchin
Special thanks to Iris Garrelfs and Improvisors’ Collective from the Department of Music at Goldsmiths
This project begins at the fragile boundary where tree roots meet the human-made ground, where soil gives way to asphalt, cement, or lime. I extracted the edge-lines of these suffocated roots—those harsh contours formed by urban paving materials pressing against organic growth—and translated them into a series of visual symbols: sonic notations derived from ecological trauma.
Through printmaking, I rendered these markings onto paper, allowing the textures to speak through repetition, ink, and shifting surfaces. The printed scores are not fixed compositions but open, breathing invitations—visual rhythms echoing the story of entrapment, resilience, and silent resistance. The root lines, once constrained by the hardened skin of the city, now flow across the printed page, reactivated as living signals.
To bring this score to life, I invited the Improvisors’ Collective from the Department of Music at Goldsmiths to perform with it. Through sound, they responded to the notations, translating the visual traces of strangled roots into ephemeral sonic gestures. This performance transforms a static document of ecological violence into a shared act of listening and response, where improvisation becomes a way of restoring agency to the more-than-human.
At the Verge of Rootedness is an inquiry into how visual-sonic translation can express the pain and persistence of rooted life under industrial constraint. It asks: What might a tree’s silenced breath sound like? And how might we listen differently, together?
In this work, the imposed asphalt becomes “noise” that interrupts the natural “signal” of root life—yet through print and performance, that very interference is reanimated and reclaimed as a message of survival and ecological resonance.
︎︎︎BACK NEXT ︎︎︎
liangchennn.sui@gmail.com；slcbeihang@163.com Liangchen Sui ©️2025 London, Shanghai