“Notes on Planetary Living” transforms fluent’s glass pavilion into a resonance box. The sound piece giving the exhibition its title, expands through an immersive installation that takes John Bergers’ Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead, as a departure point exploring how life and death share a common sonic space, as well as the poetic dimension that often blurs the interaction between the two.
The brutality we are witnessing today, in the last months of 2023 is unbearable. But it’s not a new form of brutality, it is just the pressure of an ongoing form of violence releasing to a more perceptible layer of the world. The kind of brutality predating and consuming Western civilization since the invention on time. And so, does music predate humanity. As Kim Stanley teaches us, “since 160 million years, music was the first human language, and still is the language of animals and birds.”1
The bird song at the core of “Notes on Planetary Living” was recorded on Monday, June 14, 2020 at 4:41 AM in Ernst-Thälmann Park behind Berlin’s Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Prenzlauer Berg. The atmospheric prejudice as an African in the West serves as a constant reminder of the power structures and inherent institutional dangers that make accessing spheres of whiteness in “normal” times—not only in this tragic and cruel time of civilizatory decay—an act of resonance. The simple act of living, of “occupying a space that is both sonically uncontainable and heard.”2
at fluent, Santander
until February 9, 2024