How to give voice to any thing? In this project I challenge and develop the posthumanist notion of letting things speak for themselves. Paradoxically, I do this by recording my own voice while running on revetments, i.e. breakwater structures that prevent erosion in urban coastal areas. Could autoethnography also ‘evoke’ (Bochner & Ellis, 2016) the surroundings to make them tell their own stories? What kind of story would that be? One ontological and epistemological concern is to discuss the role of the human subject in posthumanism.

By recording the voice of my running body in this eerie and unwelcoming no man’s land, a performative ‘nature writing’ of sorts is taking place. one which conjoins the universe’s own story, which the philosopher Michel Serres calls the ‘the grand narrative’ (Watkin, 2015).

The practice for the investigation, revetment running, is apt in many ways for elaborating with the posthumanist repertoire: water is the posthumanist element par preference (Barad, 2007); the uneven surface of revetments demands attention so that the subject (which I define as “free-willed” and intentional”) is hindered to have a say; revetments are fuzzy areas (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014) between land and sea, and hence a materialisation of the posthumanist concept ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008).

I argue that there is a place for the human subject in posthumanist narratives, but that it ‘comes to the party second’ (Watkin, 2015). Prior come – what I refer to as – the project (the body thrust forward by the surroundings) and the interject (the voice of that body).