AM Kanngieser is an award-winning geographer and sound artist, working through listening and attunement to approach the relations between people, place and ecologies. Over the past decade they have focused on experimenting with sonic methods and practices (including field recordings, radio building and training, sonic ethnographies, oral testimonies, songs, sonifications, composition, sound walks) for environmental-geographical research. These methods and their application have been developed through sound events with The Natural History Museum London, Live Art Development Agency, Sound and Music and 2 Degrees Festival/Arts Admin and been variously outlined in papers for interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, WIRES Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D amongst many others.
Since 2015, AM has been collaborating with Pacific women, queer and transgender artists, organisers and scholars through Climates of Listening, an ongoing project that amplifies movements for self-determination in relation to continuing colonisation through resource extraction, environmental racism and ecological disaster. This research emphasises the nuanced and variegated ways that communities and people understand, produce knowledge about, and collectively attend to their lived experiences of ecocide. This has included running podcast production workshops with groups in Fiji and the Marshall Islands for which an Introduction to Podcasting manual was complied with the Fijian audio producers Mere Nailatikau and Krystelle Lavaki-Danford from The Two Fishes show.
Alongside academic publications AM has concentrated on producing collaborative audio compositions and prose works for radio and installation to disseminate material more accessibly to national and international audiences. This has required them to place importance on making their work more broadly resonant, including for festivals such as Sonic Acts, Unsound, Transmediale, With For About 2020 and Liquid Architecture. This work has been featured on, and commissioned by, Documenta 14 Radio, BBC 3, ABC Radio National, Arts Centre Melbourne, Radio del Museo Reina Sofía, Savvy Gallery Berlin, Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art, Deutschland Radio, and QAGOMA, and will be unfolded through a forthcoming monograph Between Sounds and Silence: Listening for Environmental Relations. Interviews on this work can be found in Wire Magazine: Adventures in Sound and Music, Mediapart and Radio Web MACBA.
AM is a Marie Curie International Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Prior to their current role, they were a Senior Research Fellow with Seedbox Environmental Humanities Laboratory, University of Sydney, and held a Vice Chancellors Research Fellowship in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong. They have also held a continuing lectureship at Goldsmiths College (Sociology) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Royal Holloway (Geography), University of London. AM has received funding from the European Commission, the Economic and Social Research Council UK, the British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust, the Australian Research Council and the Australia Council for the Arts.