How does listening to the land process new and old stories? What does ‘land listening’ mean for worlding and (processes)? Sub question: What can we learn with this sentient and healing land?
Longer description:
This current research is situated within practices of care, such as environmental and climate justice, and in practices of sensing and feeling earth. It includes site-sensitive research with the field of the Terre Rouge, also called the Minett, located in south-west Luxembourg. This site, with the remnants of open pit and underground mining, its steel complexes, slag heaps and blast furnaces, constitutes both the ruinous imprint and symptom of twentieth-century extractive capitalism and globalisation.
Looking at its deep time, its history of extraction, and its current regeneration as an Unesco biosphere, we are interested in what we can learn with this healing land. In addition to scientific and academic information, we are undertaking relational multi-sensorial practices of listening and becoming with the land, generating an embodied, situated and partial knowledge.
Listening
Part of the research consists of the practice of listening, inspired by the work of Salome Voegelin, and the work of deep listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, among others .
As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. It is a symbiotic relationship. As you listen the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect. […] Our world is a complex matrix of vibrating energy, matter and air, just as we are made of vibrations. Vibration connects us with all beings and connects us to all things interdependently.
–Quantum Listening, by Pauline Oliveros
Deep time
We are here extending the listening practice to listen to deep time. My interest in deep time, which is geological time, consists in widening the awareness and thinking to a terrestrial scale and history, and to a long-term thinking. Listening to deep time could reveal a more grounded future, listening to the “first musical notes of worlds to come” (by Bayo Akomolafe).
Sensuousness
Another aspect of the research is our sensuous relationships to the sensuousness/sentience of the landscapes of the recovering terre rouge. Hence, in addition to listening, we are further developing multi-sensorial listening and relational practices with land, such as the sounding-the-body-landscapes-relational-dance practice of wandering and wondering.
Relational practices
By relational practice, I mean being with, multi-sensorial listening , as well as feeling, moving and voicing with the land, foregrounding a bodily felt experience of place. Sensing earth, working with the body in relation to land through all the senses, such as listening, smelling, sensing (touch, texture, temperature), seeing, as well as the sense of the body and of movement, such as the vestibular and interoceptive systems and proprioception, we also add the sensing of the voice and its vibrations. Tasting is/will be present within shared meals with collaborators and/or participants in walk-and-work-shops.
Embodied extrospection
Through these embodied practices, and embodied extrospection, I am intent on learning from the land, and from how the land has regenerated into its diverse bio-ecosystem, aware that this regeneration is also now humanly managed..
Inspired by certain indigenous practices and cosmologies, my interest in this bodily anchored presence is so that on can sense far beyond oneself so as to increase one’s attuning to the information, feedback and intelligences within a place or landscape, with the intention of learning to be in conversation with a/the landscape, perceiving ourselves beyond ourselves as part of the land.
Enchantment
My work being motivated by a (re-)enchantment of the world, and the word enchantment etymologically coming from the French word “chanter”, we in this practice allow the affect of the sensory relation with the land to express itself through the voice, as a gift back to the landscape, a form of vibrational relating and massage.
Listening to the landscape, listen to the landscape listening to you/me in return, I am curious in what mutual relational listening and sounding will emerge, inviting a personal transformation and becoming with the land through the relational listening, being, moving and sounding with.
Part of the research is the intended development into a long term participatory project of regular walk-and-work-shops consisting of different chapters on/around its themes and quests.
In exchange with Alexandra Baybutt, Christine Sollie and Salome Voegelin. With the support of a research grant from the Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg.
In April we went on geological walks with geographer Nico Graff and with geologist Romain Meyer (Association géologique du Luxembourg), reading the land and its evolution over millions of years, as well as it's current regeneration. In May 2024 I shared the research and the sound-the-body-landscape practice with artists Nora Wagner and Kim El Ouardi within their participatory on the road film project entitled “The Capsule”, and within a residency at Spectrum in Rumelange. In August 2024 I shared the research in situ with Christine Sollie and Alexandra Baybutt.
28 September 2024 Presentation of terre rouge, I listen with you at ‘ARTZero - Greater Region Zero Emission Art Symposium", under 'Best practice projects and presentation of artistic projects', at Europäische Kunstakademie e.V. Kunsthalle Trier (DE)
Further/next question: What are the current human and ecological impacts of the two in Luxembourg headquartered steel and mining industries' practices in other places, particularly in the Global South?