Put Your Ear to Stone and You Will Hear the Future Sculptural multi-channel audio installation, 2020
“What does the Earth ask of us?”
This is the question Potawatomi environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer poses in response to hetero-patriarchal capitalism’s growth-obsessed logic of unbridled resource extraction, whose only question is “What more can we take from the Earth?”
Her answer is that the earth asks us to listen. This listening is an embodied perceptual practice that asks us to tune in to both human and non-human others and the multiplicity of temporalities that surround us. It implies an opening up to the various vibrational or rhythmic qualities and characteristics of the earth's multiplicities, perceived as diverse temporalities which coexist at any given moment, moving together on different planes. It is an ethical practice of acknowledgement and recognition.
The sonic material for this work was gathered in the heart of the Bakken Shale oil boom in North Dakota, on the Ft. Berthold – Three Affiliated Tribes reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations, where modernity’s petro-time is forcing the ongoing sacrifice of diverse modes of temporalisation and imposing a monotonous linear rhythm of constant acceleration. In the past ten years, the oil industry has turned the once peaceful landscape of northeast North Dakota into an industrial nightmare, replacing the sounds of birds singing with the deafening roar of oil tankers and natural gas flares. In order to counter the ideological machines which divide the world into “useful” and “useless” in the race to extract every last molecule of fossil fuel from the ground, listening becomes an act of sympoetic recognition and inter-species & inter-material solidarity, an act of resistance to the violent flattening time of capitalism.
This work was produced for the exhibition "Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales” - Centre for Contemporary Creation Matadero. Put Your Ear to Stone and you will Hear the Future - as part of the segment 'Queering the City: A Sono-Orientation' curated by Katayoun Arian. Madrid, Spain. https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/twelve-cautionary-urban-tales
