It's weird though because it's not all the time, right? It comes and goes. It's like it comes in waves that sometimes I feel like maybe I'm on the perimeter of happiness and satisfaction Am I satisfied? I don't know Am I joyous? It's like I feel like I'm existing but I'm not Am I in there? Like really joyous? I don't know
Sunflower fields forests soil like the smell of rain on soil on earth When it rains, you hear the rain on the roof
I would imagine exhaling releasing
having no tension
Mmakgosi Kgabi
ii
Can I ask you a question?
Yes.
Is there ever a time that you feel both inside and outside a place where you feel both held and not held?
I feel both held and not held by the queer community
I made a decision ten years ago to live as a trans person
but I feel the fact that I don't take hormones makes me insufficient
I am hearing you say:
the fact that you don't take hormones makes you feel insufficient.
Yes
And also that there is a history of millennia and millennia of men oppressing and enslaving women
Thank you for taking part in the workshop. In order to confirm your place, please fill in the following form and transfer the workshop fee of 250€ (200€ earlybird before December 23) to the following account:
IBAN: DE46 1009 0000 3057 5040 04 Bank Name: Berliner Volksbank Account Name: Benjamin Teicher Description: HYENAZ Sound Design
We have a limited number of discounted soli-places available for those without the means to pay the full workshop fee. Please write to us if this applies to you.
In 2015, we began our slow movement project Foreign Bodies. Ten years later, we are finally giving birth to this work, and are so eager and happy to share it with you. On September 18, we invite you to a private listening party and artist talk at the offices of Orchestral Tools on the River Spree.
Bodies: near and distant. Bodies which have been determined “grievable”–bodies which are not. Devouring Bodies: extracting and extracted from in measures of time, energy, value, blood, piss, shit, cum. Having a body vs. Being a body and existing somewhere in between. Hearable bodies, bodies that signal that they must be heard, and bodies we choose to ignore. Glacial bodies and frenzied bodies.
Across 21 works, constructed from field recordings gathered in transit points, intentional communities, migrant camps, ancient traveler’s outposts and along pilgrimage paths, we have created sonic reactions to bodies in motion, in resistance, in synchronicity. We are also accompanied by the voices of Thomas F. DeFrantz, Sivan Ben Yishai, Erin Manning, Sylbee Kim, among many other writers, choreographers and activists who contribute their reflections with us.
During our journeys, we began to think about these questions of relationality, while simultaneously considering our own bodies in the act of recording itself: what is it to “unthink mastery”; how we relate to the animacy of sound; how we build equitable collaborations with human and non-human actors; how do we resist cultures of extraction, and what kinds of methods allow us to weave music from one sound fabric?
And where do you locate yourself, or where is your body located? (And by whom?) Can you move, and would you? Is your body packed in permissions and papers or is it so bare that your skin chafes on edges and borders? Is your body light enough to float above surfaces, or does it sink to ocean floors? And why is it that my body and your body are allocated different shares of the wealth of the earth? Who or what does it serve to carve up bodies so?
These are the questions that animate the Foreign Bodies. We will explore them with you as we share the music. We hope you can make it.
Accountability Practices in Sound Design and Field Recording
*a very useful phrase coined by Sadie Lune
Introduce yourself, your project, your idea, your goals
Talk openly about the hierarchies which may be already present
Map the context of the recording (people, place, time, sociopolitical context)
Make works which are context specific, and don’t arbitrarily mix contexts
Name contributors and spell their names correctly
Don’t record undercover
You have asked others to share–be likewise ready to share back
Send collaborators their media
Respect requests about how media is used
Speak openly about funding and payment
Develop processes of accountability to collaborators after the initial recording time is over
Continue to notify collaborators about the journey and life of a project; how and where it is shown
Make clear distinctions and have open conversations about whether a person is a collaborator, contributor, or employee.
Come to a consensus about how a person would like to be attributed
Offer payment or trade for the giving of content (i.e. sound or image)
Consider other forms of repayment, collaboration, long term support
Develop a clear and consistent strategy and system for remembering and documenting
Be mindful of the tools used in the process of the project and the makers of those tools
Attribute the people who contributed to the tools that you utilize in your work
Research the sources of the tools that are used
Research the sources of the props and other materials used in a collaboration
Have conversations about what a collaboration consists of and what are the expectations
Keep up with relationships over time: accountability and interconnectivity
practice “Radical collaborative” and “correlational narratives” (Katherine Mc Kittrick ed.) Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis
Release open source works
Treat collaboration as skill sharing, so that others go away enriched with certain skills
Treat each person, object and place as “irreplaceable”
Don’t mix contexts
Digital media has multiplied possibilities of sound manipulation to the nth degree. Lets say we are creating an audio visual work
Treate everyone with whom you interact the way youd want to be treated by a stranger.
Sure—maybe a friend comes into your house and takes a few snapshots and you dont worry about it too much. Its casual and you think youl be in touch forever. This may or may not be true – and is worth actually considering. But that aside, consider a stranger comes into your home and takes puctures of you, takes a reocridng of you talking. Lets say yo uare out front of your house playing with your kids and a stranger asks to take photos and video of you to find out about how you live. What would you like from them? What would you like to know about where that work travels?
Its easy enough to think — oh I do this all the time – I put photos of myself in the internet and willingly share them as “digital artworks” on a daily basis. But someoone is making a profit on thoes photographs—its just htat hteh somone is not you.
Imagine an artist comes in, takes images ofyou, makes art out of you, and gains money for their work. Or maybe they dont make money for their work, but rather something much more illusive—fame, cultural capital.
Its fundamentally flawed idea that some people aught to be the objevt of study while others are not. Often the object of study are those “underrepresented voices” +
consider whether or not you would allow someone to ,make an object out of you.Woudl you potentially be okay with this ? What would make you okay? If you wouldnt be okay– why not? Why are why arent these things important when approaching others and what fundamnetal assumptions might lie behind those decisions?
Name contributors
This may seem obvious and easier than it actually is. In the course of a work day of recording and working in community, its remarkably easy to miss someone from whom you’ve taken a recording, especially when they might play a minor role in your interaction or you havent had much time to talk to someone. Have a system in place ahead of time so that when you’re working with people and things are moving rapidly, you dont take notes on a bunch of tiny pieces of paper that are easily lost, or place names in five different platforms inside of your phone that you later struggle to piece together. Taking two minutes now will save hours later.
The system should look something like this:
Date and approximate time – Full name with correct spelling (dont guess!) – place – email – social media – notes (key words to help you remember who this specific person was. No digital contact? Take a phone number and house number.
Create a simple spreadsheet or note taking app located on your phone so that you can write each persons full name—be sure to get the spelling right and spend the time to get it in the first place. Get email contacts at the same time as their full name. You never know if later a persons voice might become central to a work of art, but if you cant contact them, or dont know their name, it will be impossible to tell them about it later and this will live on as a disembodied aspect of the work. Moreover, you wont be able to get real permission for the work.
Once working with some people in Italy I had merely jotted down the name “guisseppe” on one sheet of paper in a notebook. I had the dedicated notebook, but inside the notebook I didnt have a clear system for taking contacts. It took me ages to locate him again by sleuthing through friends offriends on facebook. It doesnt have to be that hard.
Be Clear about what youre doing
Before you turn on your camera or your sound recorder, have a clear description of your project ready. Dont wait to be introduced. Youre the one doing the recoridng, in a sense, youve arrived armed (some people even feel attacked by the sight of camera and microphones, as some even look like weapons). Introduce yourself and explain your project. Who are you and what are you doing? It is okay to record? Even if youre not recording voices of people—maybe just taking in atmospheres, address your project to others ahead of being asked. State what you are doing and why. Speak about the possibilities of how recordings might be used.
dont record undercover (big headphones and exposed recorder when recording general atmoshpehere)
Some research and journalism has to be done undercover in order to expose structures of violence. Thats not what we are addressing here. Here we are addressing collaborative and accountable field recording that resists extractivism. Be visible. Have your equipment out—whether thats big headphones or microphones, dont be undercover or half undercover. Let people know when ouy are beginning to record.
send people their photos and their recordings, let them use material. Dont Own it or possess it
respect consent
If youve recorded someones class-send the teacher the recording so that he or she can pass it to their students and encourage them to do so. If youve made an interview with someone—send them the material right away. Even if you never use the interview, never publish it, and never use even a section of it, give them the chance to hear themselves in interview. It will help to establish you already as a collaborator rather than someone who comes in and leaves.
Dont make assumptions about what a person desires or needs in return from you. Racist and classist attiftudes can easily enter dynamics, where the person taking the recording makes assumptions about what the person needs or desires. Perhaps you believe that someone doesnt need a copy of their interview or wouldnt want it. Perhaps the person is elderly and you belive that they will enver download their interview. It doesnt matter. Treat everyone with the same respect, regardless of who they are. Chances are, they will figure out a way to access the materials you have given them—if not right away, at some point. Either way, youve fulfilled your end of the bargain. People also change in terms of what their needs are, and dont always undersand in the moment what they might desire down the road. Do your best to remain open to the acceessing of the matieral.
Who pays us? Whether it is a job—payment for art or funding—also payment for art, from where do our funds come? What are our limits and boundaries? Does it have to do with a performative limit (ie, I dont want my face shown but Ill accept the money) or does it have to do with a strict ethical boundary?
How do we form and keep relationship with people in our projects and attribute them?
What is the difference between a collaborator and an employee of an artistic project? How are they attributed differently? How can they be lifted up ?
Payment – Cash
If you are making an interview with someone that is set, scehduled and recorded, figure out a way to offer payment. I dont believe this means that you have to pay every single person whose voice might make it into youre recorder, but have a clear system for how you decide what is just incidental and what is clearly planned out.
Have this set up ahead of time, so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily. As well as the system of amount, whether wage or compensatoin, should be set, not dependent upon a person or their context. I have a 10 euro minimum for 40 minutes, based around the idea that 15euros / hour is a living wage. Sometimes we have the idea that paying someone so little is “insulting,” but I belive that the reality is htat most people can use the money and appreciate a token for their time. It pays for transportationg and maybe a mael. In some contexts, 10 euros is a lot of money.
Many people will insist not to get paid – insist back – that this is part of the project. Insist until the point htat to insist more would be culturaly inappropriate, and only in this case give up and decide if there is another way that you can offer compensation.
When traveling outsife of the EU, I didnt make a differentiation about what a living wage would be or should be, I simply offered the same amount converted into the local currency. For my collaborators, it was a decent amount of money. Giving an interview is time and energy and deserves being paid. Especially as my interviews were about labour, it seemed to makes sense to ttak about wage. In some contexts or in some proejcts, its ossible that monetary wage doesnt feel right or make sense. But what are some other ways to repay collaborators?
Inform Collaborators ahead of time what youre offering
Tell your collaborators if you are offering compensation, what you are offering, why you are offering. Also tell them about what kinds of other things you will do:
1. send them any recordings or photos that are made
2. ask them their permission for which sections are used
3. tell them about the usage of the work
4. inform them about the jounrey of the project – where is it being shown ? When ? Is it still okay?
Keep Getting Consent
consetn doesnt just happen on day one. A work of art makes a journey and its ethical to continueously gain consent.
At first it might seem scary – what if someone sudenly decides to pull out of a porject? What if they want their voice or their image replaced? Consider that if a person who really doesnt want to be represented is the lynchpin of a project– its probably not mean to be. Imagein the hurt feeligns and negative emotions that will surround your artwork if you contine to present a figure who doesnt want ot be respresented. If they are not the lynchpin, it could be painful at first to remove them, but eventually its for the best.
Consider as well that the life of a project is a real journey that lives on, takes on its own life, and meanwhile the persons involved have aged, changed, grown. So have you. The art you created four years ago may no longer represent you, or may temporarily not fit. It may feel—for years, even, completely unrelevenat to your expreicne. You may not want to touch it. Take it out twenty years later and it might feel great, or it might feel outdated. The important thing is to stay in touch with the living body of your artwork and the living people attached to the artwork. If you are important enough to consider when thinking about the life of a work, the people that you are working with are also important enough to cnsider– where are they? What are they doing?
Early on in my carreer as an artist, some of the earliest interviews Ive bever done—there was no internet available or smartphones. At the time I releied on this, and the idea of snail mail, to be lazy in my work. But even when folks dont have access to internet
Wage or Trade is not supplement for ethics
Just because youve paid someone or offered some kind of compensation doesnt mena that youve bought them out of the other things you can or should offer.
Other forms of repayment, collaboration, long term support
Attribution
Naming
Giving up power to determine use of the work
Contextualizing the moment of extraction
Careful mapping of the process (people, place, sociopolitical context)
Remembering, documenting
Keeping collaborators and subjects connected to the life of the project and throughout the life of the project
Being careful about the tools used in the process of the project
Using open source materials
Understanding and knowing the source of the tools used
Understanding and knowing the source of the clothing and props worn on and off “stage” in the life of an artistic project
Figuring out how to make collaborations authentic
Providing copies of recordings that can be used as the person would like, with attribution
Keeping up with relationships over time: accountability and interconnectivity
“Radical collaborative” and “correlational narratives” (Katherine Mc Kittrick ed.) Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis
Releasing open source works
Collaboration as skill sharing, so that others go away enriched with certain skills
Treating each person, object and place as “irreplaceable”
Don’t mix contexts
Name contributors
Don’t record undercover
Send collaborators their media
Respect consent
Explore: Who pays us? Whether it is a job—payment for art or funding—also payment for art, from where do our funds come? What are our limits and boundaries? Does it have to do with a performative limit (ie, I don’t want my face shown but Ill accept the money) or does it have to do with a strict ethical boundary?
How do we form and keep relationship with people in our projects and attribute them?
What is the difference between a collaborator and an employee of an artistic project? How are they attributed differently? How can they be lifted up ?
Payment – Cash
Other forms of repayment, collaboration, long term support
Attribution
Naming
Giving up power to determine use of the work
Contextualizing the moment of extraction
Careful mapping of the process (people, place, sociopolitical context)
Remembering, documenting
Keeping collaborators and subjects connected to the life of the project and throughout the life of the project
Being careful about the tools used in the process of the project
Using open source materials
Understanding and knowing the source of the tools used
Understanding and knowing the source of the clothing and props worn on and off “stage” in the life of an artistic project
Figuring out how to make collaborations authentic
Keeping up with relationships over time: accountability and interconnectivity
“Radical collaborative” and “correlational narratives” (Katherine Mc Kittrick ed.) Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis
Releasing open source works
Collaboration as skill sharing, so that others go away enriched with certain skills
Treating each person, object and place as “irreplaceable”
HYENAZ “Entanglements” is a VR experience that invites participants to explore their own entanglements with objects, landscapes, and extractive processes, with HYENAZ as their guide. In a fantastical environment—immersed in soundscapes and textures recorded through HYENAZ’s slow-movement research project Foreign Bodies—objects reveal their animacy, and participants are invited to engage in speculative storytelling to deepen their understanding of interrelationality.
Entanglements is part of the Culturhub Finland exhibition “Virtual Art House”. To access the work visit https://taiteentalo.fi/virtual-art-house/ ideally on a Chromium based browser. When you enter the space, turn your avatar 180 degrees and approach the grey orb to the left of the small walking robot. If you don’t see the orb yet, you may need to wait 1-2 minutes, depending on the speed of your internet connection. When you step inside the orb you will teleport into Entanglements.
As artists and researchers, we are constantly exploring the connections between art, the environment, and labour rights. Interviews from our ongoing Extraction project were broadcast as part of Mad Kate’s S.W.E.A.T. podcast.
In March 2023 we had the opportunity to interview Donato Laborante, who we met during our tour of the Murgia region of Italy in 2015. As well as being a curator, Donato is a poet, actor, performer and storyteller who galvanizes the artistic scene to create happenings and to move people to take political action in their everyday actions. During one of our visits, we made a journey into a marble quarry in Apricena, and were joined by several local artists who spontaneously began playing percussive sounds on the wall of the quarry. It was this moment that sparked our interest in the idea of extraction as metasignfier–including the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; minerals, gas and water from the ground; sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the exotic” from our very identities. Our third visit to the area allowed us to deepen our understanding of the relationship between stone, sound, and time.
February 2023 featured an interview with Professor Imre Szeman, the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. During the interview, he shared his insights on defining extractivism, the role of the artist in using the term, the use and limitation of regarding everything as animate, and greenwashing. From 2021-2022, he was the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada. He is co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, which explores the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change, and the leader of After Oil, a collective which has produced After Oil (West Virginia University Press, 2016) and Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). He is the author of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (WVUP, 2019) and is working on The Future of the Sun, a book detailing corporate and state control of the transition to renewables.
May 2023 featured an interview with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz in conversation with HYENAZ in the context of our project on art and cultures of extraction. Together we talk about time, Black aesthetics, NOWness and the processes of building creative encounters. Thomas F. DeFrantz teaches at Northwestern University and directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
S.W.E.A.T. airs on Colaboradio Free Radios Berlin Brandenburg – 88.4fm in Berlin, 90.7fm in Potsdam, and streaming at FR-BB.org. Afterwards its available for streaming from your podcast app.
Selected Documentation from Fonds Darstellende Künste #TakeHeart Residency, Kampnagel 2022
WORKSHOP – TECHNIQUES FOR AUDITORY RESISTANCE
In this periodic performance workshop, we invite any and all musicians and non musicians to take part in a conceptual mapping of a chosen area. On the 30th of June, using the garden at Kampnagel as our epicenter, we mapped our surroundings conceptually and “affectively”. We then invited participants to join us on a sound gathering walk, where we recorded 1. atmospheres 2. texts 3. “found instruments”. Ahead of the recording, we discussed how as a group we will consider consent, animacy and longevity, migration and authorship in relationship to the subjects of recording, and how our decisions will effect the way in which we undertake the recording process.
Some of the questions we considered were: Is it wrong to include humans in works of art without their consent? Why? Is it wrong to include non-human animals in works of art without their consent? Why? Is it wrong to include non-animal entities (i.e. rocks and stones) in works of art without their consent? Why? Is consent important in field recording ? Why? How will we gain consent from humans and nonhuman animals ? Can we do something performative to “ask” consent when there is no shared language? Is there something else we can do ? What actions will we take before recording a sound? How will be know when one person decides to begin recording sound? Is there violence in individuation when we have to decide who is the author of each sound and ask consent of that author?
DAILY SCORE – THE LIVING TEXT
The living text is the skeleton of what we would like a theatre piece to look, a theatre piece which attempts to refuse extraction from each other or itself. It is a text which we acknowledge as having a life of its own; therefore, it resists even our authorship. We acknowledge that we set it into motion and attempt to give breath to it, but eventually even the text will float away.
The Living Text writing practice score looks like this:
write for two hours every day, for 40 days of the residency
let the processes of research on extraction that you have already done inform what you understand performance to be or to be able to be
as you write, allow the processes to be performances and the performance to be a process.
as your write, remember that the writing is part of the process, so it, too, is a performance
try to write one of the following: 1. score 2. scene 3. prose 4. resource
writing in the language “markdown”, begin to compile a git repository, one which we hope will eventually become opensource. This will allow the text to be constantly written and rewritten. Through forking it will be possible for other manifestations or collectives to branch off from early iterations of this performance concept and to reformulate the texts at will
PERIODIC SCORE – TALK TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS
make a list of people who we are interested in talking to about “art and extractivism”, including those whose work we find affinity, new and old collaborators, strangers whom we have read or heard or like their work
compose a thoughtful and person email inviting them to a recorded conversation, reminding potential interviewees of our compendium of tactics when recording
arrange a date and time with those who respond positively
arrange a translator where necessary
research platforms for properly recording two sides of the conversation separately
send a reminder
make a list of possible questions
record a one hour conversation with the person
aftercare: send the recording and transcript to the person we spoke to and thank them
DAILY SCORE – FULL TRANSPARENCY
Research one thing that’s on, in, or facilitates your body, each day, for 40 days
take a photograph of yourself. Try to include your full body
let the photograph help you visualize all the things you see on your body
list them
looking at all the things on your body, start to think about all the things you don’t see but that are also on or in your body
list them
thinking about all those things that you don’t see, think about things which are not “things” but perhaps processes and energies that facilitate those things
list them
choose one of the things on your list to investigate and one of them
Stop and address any and all misunderstandings of any word or concept
In this ongoing iterative performance, we show up in hybrid virtual and real spaces which are something chancing between Matka in Bucharest, Kampnagel Hamburg, Leftist Festival Lithuania, Synth Library Prague, Hopscotch Reading room Berlin, and the virtual space called “DISCORD” where we are joined by an AI called Craig. Craig is dressed like a bear, and/or his avatar looks like a bear but he sounds like a white man whose native language is English. Perhaps we should also dress like bears but instead we normally dress our absolute worst—we normally do not put on makeup or what someone would call “costumes”, but rather the most regular of our regular day wear because we have either biked very far and are sweaty or not biked far at all and have barely left our beds. These states of being have been reiterated over the past years of the global pandemic, practiced and well worn in, hard to let go of.
The reading group takes on the power dynamics of a space, of any space, of the theater space, which is also the sidewalk. The reading group is a stage and it is attached to the same problems of the theater. Why is it hard to get people to join a free event? Who should the target audience be—friends, close friends who already enjoy spending time together, but who may not be genuinely drawn to the topic? Or strangers—who are intellectually drawn to the topic but may not really enjoy spending time with each other? What pulls people together and keeps them independently connected? When an event is free, what makes people decide not to come? Is it because they have not made a monetary contract? Or because they have something else to do—something that is related to work and to economy and to earning money? Or something else which is more “fun”? What makes an intellectual pursuit “fun”, and is it a problem when it’s not? Does it feel like work, and therefore, do people desire to get paid for it? Does it feel like it feeds them intellectually which therefore makes them more viable in their fields, which then connects them to their careers and to work and therefore—they should be getting paid for it? Or is it, for some other reason, a very unattractive place to be?
Who has decided that we should read this text, and who is the author. Why have we given them the space to spend time with their words? Of course, we have reasons. Good reasons. Mel Y Chen has written a text called “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect”, within which they discuss, among many other things, animacy heirarchies. Such heirarchies, which could be described using terms like: “alive, very alive and less alive” or “human, less human, less than human, nonhuman”, are inbuilt to our languages and to our social fabric, and index how we regard other things with respect and value. The text seems relevant to our work because we are thinking about field recording other humans and nonhumans, and a sense of respect (or lack of respect) must be inbuilt into the way in which we approach another human whom we record. Field recording is a relation in the moment. It is also a long term work of art, which will theoretically live—in some form. Understanding the animacy of the subject … Rather —interrogating the animacy of the subject—seems to be integral to understanding the relationship of the recording.
PERIODIC SCORE – OBSESSIVE FIELDTRIP
Using the Daily Score “Full Transparency” described above, choose one object or process to obsessively follow.
extend the minimal research from the index card and spend time finding out everything you can about the manufacturing process
find out where the object or resource is manufactured
visit the location
come as close to the location as you possibly can and document yourself there
if you can’t get inside the location, walk around the perimeter and document what is there
stop and journal about your experience, what you see, hear, and experience
For this periodic score, we visited the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide Berlin-Brandenburg, opened by CEO Elon Musk in March 2022. The factory aims to produce around 500,000 electric vehicles annually.
Queer Talks: HYENAZ and Nóra Ugron on art, extractivism and continuity from a queer, decolonial and posthuman perspective. The talks were part of the complementary programme of the exhibition “Feel ~ Drift ~ Sing” in Triumf Amiria. Part 1 took place at the end of September 2021 at /SAC @ Atelierele Malmaison, Bucharest, as part of the MATKA project “How Should We Talk About Queer Culture?”. Part 2 was at Casa Tranzit (Tranzit House) in Cluj, as part of the MATKA project “How Should We Talk About Queer Culture?”. Both talks were supported by Goethe-Institut Bucuresti and curated by Mihaela Cirjan.
As sound artists we make and take recordings. Can we talk about extracting minerals from a landscape and extracting sounds in the same breath? Are they manifestations of the same phenomenon? In what ways are they the same and in what ways are they different.
Extracting minerals is removing something from a landscape leaving behind a scar. We found ourselves in such a scar when we were taken by a collection of men from a town in Southern Italy to a marble quarry. We descended, and at the base we bashed stones and made recordings. We took metal pieces and thrashed them against a wall of rock.
Extracting sounds from a landscape in this way leaves the landscape physically in the same state as before one entered it. In that sense, extracting sounds is not quite the same as extracting minerals, for it is not the material that is taken, but a copy of it. A sound is produced, and the recording is a facsimile from which more and more copies can be made.
So should we think of this as an act of extraction? When a painter paints a landscape, are they extracting from the landscape. My gut tells me no, but does not tell me precisely why. Perhaps it depends on the painter. If this painter opens themselves so much to the landscape that their consciousness merges with it, in the painting of it, is that extraction? It seems much more like the beginning of an ethical relationship, for the merging of the consciousness and landscape would only be possible through the presence of care.
Is it possible to care for a landscape in the same way as one cares for a person? In existentialism, care flows from something known as “irreplaceability”. Love and friendship flows from the fact that this person is not exchangeable for another. When a friend or lover dies, the presence of another friend or lover can console, but cannot replace the being whose absence rips a hole in the self.
The destruction of landscapes can also produce feelings of melancholia of a similar tenor as the loss of human beings. the destruction of a place is never satiated by the existence of another place. As such, places are irreplaceable.
There are other ways that we treat beings as irreplaceable, not only in the acute phase of mourning them when they die or in some other way leave our lives. We form ethical relations with the things that we love. As bell hooks reminds us, love and abuse cannot coexist. When I act out of love I act out of reciprocity and responsibility. this reciprocity and responsibility has temporal dimensions too. I am not only here for you today, but I am here for you tomorrow as well. Though we each seek our freedom in friendship and love, we are still bound, and these binds give our freedom meaning, in the same way that light gives darkness meaning, as presence is to absence.
So to treat a place from which I take a sound as I would treat a person who I love would imply that I have an ongoing relationship with them, that we are bound somehow. So if I record the sounds of a quarry, already a somehow traumatised space, i am somehow responsible to that quarry, to the people who were there with me, to the stones. How rarely, in my artistic practice, have I lived up to these binds of friendship and love.
How can we manifest this responsibility and reciprocity to both the human and non-human others with whom the act of gathering sounds brings us into contact.
It could very easily become mere protocol.
“Did you get all the email addresses?”
“What are the GPS coordinates of this space? Write them down. Drop a pin.”
“What is the history of this place. Is it on Wikipedia?”
None of these acts are bad, or the opposite of love, but if merely protocol, then they will not contribute to an ethical relationship between artist and place.
Kate has been writing about consent, about what it means to consent to an act. And we learned through etymology that at least in the past, in its Latin form, this word implied “feeling with”. Whether or not this is the contemporary meaning of consent does not matter, for this insight shines a light on how to separate the mere performance of gaining consent, or of any act of responsibility or reciprocity, from one which is authentic. And that is the dimension of feeling.
Feeling is something which cannot take a contract form, nor be enclosed by a map, because the map is not the territory, and the territory shifts beneath our feet. A feeling of care is never the same from one moment to the next, between this entity and another, in this place, or that place, now or then. Only when you feel it, will you know you are truly there.
What utility could this feeling of care have? Would it stay in the domain of the private or does it have political valencies as well? What could be said to be changed, if I have an ethical relationship to a stone, versus having a non-ethical relationship. For one thing, a truly ethical relationship with a stone could not be commodifiable, because that would be to thingify it, and thus remove the possibility of reciprocity. This is hard, for artists, embedded in capitalistic modes of production, but nevertheless, this entails that I cannot privatise it, not even my copy of it, or my copy of my copy of it. The act of art becomes necessarily and act of resistance to capitalism. The extent to which I commodify this interlocutor in my artistic practice is the extent to which i treat it as a commodity, that is I imply that it is replaceable and as replaceable has no value beyond its commodity value, its exchangeability. I want to breathe life into the stone, but the stone becomes a zombie.
There must be other ways, there must be, that are hard to fathom, but the mental reaching for these other ways, that is the point, that is the point, that is the point.
Perhaps it is our way of carving up the world in order to make sense of it, that is what allows me to see not only the stone as replaceable with other stones, but even the stone as stone, and the stone not as part of a rock wall, as part of the rise and fall of mountains and oceans, the enclosure and retreat of glaciers. It is as “mere stone” that I do not see it as intimately connected somehow to the pick that wrenched it from the wall, the hands that held the pick, the hands to the body, the body to the mind, the self; this being who carved the stone from the rock wall yesterday or a hundred years ago perhaps they also stood in wonderment at the world of things around her wondered to herself, where do i end, and where does the world begin? And I through the stone that I drop and record the sound of the dropping stone on the ground am connected to this person. This person I touch somehow when i hold the stone. Yet I am only connected to the stone, and this person, and the landscape and the animals, and the water, and the wind and the journey this stone took from densely compressed hydrogen in a star to densely compressed carbon on the earth, when I do not regard this stone as replaceable.
If i regarded everything “in this light”, would I not risk overload. Is it not also the fact that the concept of “irreplaceable” is possible only through the concept of “replaceable.” Would i not then fall, crumpled, in a heap, exhausted, trying to sense the infinite life-journey of every object and its nexus of interconnections to every other life object, who are all part of a vast meta-object, and themselves divisible into an infinity of micro-objects. If I saturated myself in awareness of everything and everyone i came into contact with, would I not risk falling into a river of flux from which no forms can emerge and therefore, no responsibility or reciprocity, no friendship or love.
Perhaps the solution then we can find in the metaphor of a waveform, which pulsates between two poles. Perhaps I need to embrace a waveform like existence in which one flows in and out of this awareness, where everything exists to me as potentially irreplaceable, but as I am only a window to the world (and not the world itself, and this window is slowly closing), maybe its enough to awaken this sense of irreplaceability selectively and temporarily.
Maybe this is an answer to the question: What is art? To regard the world, and all its things as irreplaceable, and pull back just at that moment where I might lose myself completely, so that making art is a dance on the precipice of self-annihilation, a precipice that is a fundamental point of tension through which my relation to the world, my relation to others, is manifested, as we used to say, by always grasping but never reaching our height of gnosis.
It is a hard process, perhaps a painful one to slip in and out of this awareness, but that is what it is to be a paradox, to be both a part of the whole and the whole at the same time. Neither of these natures can ever erase the other, and instead I float in between, like phases of the moon.
