Keening: Voices of the Stranding

Environmental artist Sam Gare and composer Alex South lead on the creation of a multi-disciplinary art project commemorating the stranding, which will take place in July 2025. The podcast will build upon this, looking at the development of this artwork, but then exploring the wider ripples caused by the stranding that moved out through the rescuers, the community, the cetacean stranding community, cetacean researchers, museum and heritage researchers, musicians and artists.

The podcast will be recorded and produced by Aoife Glass, while Francesca Turauskis is sound editor and executive producer. The podcast will:

• Share testimonies of those who were on the beach that day, and provide an opportunity to talk about interspecies grief and mourning.

• Talk to researchers and scientists who conducted the necropsies to share what is known about the whale pod, their health, their kinship, and possible factors that may have contributed to the stranding.

• Look at the wider context of cetacean strandings, what we understand about why they happen, and what what we don’t yet know.

• Explore how museum collections can help provide historical information and context, around whales but also around our changing relationship with them, from the history of whaling in the Outer Hebrides to stranding records.

• Share the call of the whales, a unique aspect of each pod, and what that says about how whales communicate, think, feel and behave.