Voices from the Indian Ocean
Voices from the Indian Ocean, by Elise Rigot. Episodes n°1 to n°5
Along the route of the Monaco 2022 Explorations mission to the Indian Ocean, visual artist Elise Rigot uses sound to document the expedition’s progress : scientists in action, animal sounds or natural atmospheres, stories ; through each character, the voices of the Indian Ocean bear witness to a culture, a heritage, but also to this quest for discovery, knowledge and truth.
Voices of attachment, recounting the relationship that the people on this mission – and – have with the Indian Ocean on a daily basis. The podcast echoes these voices, weaving together scientific accounts, life stories and the atmospheric sounds of this very special crossing.
Voices from the Indian Ocean
Episode n°1: Mermaid
In this audio clip, I give voice to Véronique Mireille Banane, a scientist at the Seychelles Islands Foundation.
She tells us a family story told to her by her grandmother when she was a child.
The recordings accompanying this extract were filmed on Aldabra atoll, which Mireille knows well and with which she has a deep attachment.
Elise Rigot
Voices from the Indian Ocean
Episode n°2: Sea turtles
In this sound capsule, I meet the sounds of humans studying sea turtles.
Jérôme Bourjea is a researcher at the Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) in Sète, after having worked for a long time on Reunion Island, where he spent a large part of his career.
I was able to follow Jérôme Bourjea, Quentin Schull and Stéphane Ciccione to Aldabra atoll, where I recorded the nocturnal soundscapes of sea turtle egg-laying.
This is what I invite you to discover.
That, and the emotional attachment of scientists to their subjects.
Elise Rigot
Voices from the Indian Ocean
Episodes n°3, 4 and 5: Aldabra
There’s an island lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
This is where it all began, where a series of symbioses and assemblages of all kinds, digestion and secretion, have elaborated the most diverse forms of life.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, marine animals captured mineral particles in the ocean, ingested and digested them, and secreted the first skeletons of our planet.
Through this process of bio-mineralization, reefs emerged from the ocean floor, continuing their slow process over millions of years.
Under the weight of their construction, they sank into the waters, mixing with the sand and sun, hardening their strength and freezing them for eternity.
The atoll was born.
A sun-scorched accretion of coral petrified with the sand, forming immense, metallic-sounding mounds.
Aldabra.
There are red-footed boobies, bobbies, blacktip sharks, lemon sharks, whispering coral reefs, prehistoric turtles and ocean as far as the eye can see.
For those who are far away, it can only be a piece of land.
An area that we only vaguely know is a shared heritage that has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, and which has taken nearly 15 years to preserve.
Yet Aldabra is not just a military or scientific issue, Aldabra is a symbol: the symbol of the Seychelles, where there is an island preserved from human activity, and where every night, sea turtles climb the slopes of the shore to lay their eggs.
This island, which they say is pristine, has seen rats, cats and at least 500 tonnes of plastic washed up on its shores.
It has seen goats and the intensive exploitation of its turtle species.
Today, a dozen people live on Aldabra and are responsible for protecting the island, which is managed by the Seychelle Islands Foundation.
These few sounds plunge us into this island, its mangroves, its passes, its beaches at the moment of the first and last rays of light.
Elise Rigot
