By
Hyden (Ke Shi)
MA Ethnographic and Documentary Film
Memory Murmur is a multimodal zine exploring temporality through two veteran oak trees on Sandy Heath, England. The oaks have survived over a century of human intervention, including extensive sand extraction during industrial expansion and wartime excavation during the Second World War. Sand taken from the site was used in construction, railway development, and military infrastructure, leaving deep hollows that permanently altered the landscape and themselves.
Rather than understanding these events as isolated moments of the past, the project considers how such disturbances continue to unfold materially within the oaks’ bodies through growth, scar, adaptation, and repetition. In this sense, temporality is approached not as a linear progression, but as an ongoing process of accumulation and endurance.
The zine combines chlorophyll photography, bark rubbing, archival fragments, and trunk soundscape recordings to explore forms of non-human temporality that exceed human rhythms of memory and history. These multimodal practices are not intended simply to document the trees, but to remain in relation with them through slow, sensory forms of attention.
Fragmented poetic texts throughout the work stage an imagined dialogue between human and oak perspectives, reflecting on differing experiences of time: human urgency against arboreal duration, historical events against ecological continuance. Memory Murmur ultimately asks whether multispecies encounters can challenge anthropocentric understandings of temporality and invite more relational ways of inhabiting time.
This piece is a response to Temporalities, the theme of our 2026 print issue, which you can read here.
Anthropolitan 