How does listening to the land process new and old stories?
What does becoming with the land mean for worlding processes?
Longer description:
The Minett site has remnants of open pit and underground mining, steel complexes, slag heaps and blast furnaces, that constitute the ruinous imprints and ghosts of twentieth-century extractive capitalism.
Within this setting, this research is situated within practices of care, such as within practices of sensing, feeling and learning from/with earth.
The field of listening
One of the relational practices we do is listening, inspired by the work of deep listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, and by the work of Salome Voegelin. On one hand we practice listening by focusing on the heard and felt sound vibrations. This sonic sensibility, as written by Salome Voegelin “reveals the invisible mobility below the surface of a visual world, the layer that shows its relationships, actions, and dynamics.” In addition to this, what one hears touches and permeates the listener, and hence one is immersed within the sonic volume. Within this enmeshment, “listening generates place; the field of listening, continually from my hearing of myself within the dynamic relationship of all that sounds” (Salome Voegelin).
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
Listening as a multi-sensorially listening with
Alongside this sonic sensing the listening developed into a multi-sensorial listening with one’s whole body and being. Anchored in a somatic sensibility, we practice this embodied extrospection as a particular attention to what is outside oneself while including oneself, so as to increase one’s attuning to the information, feedback and intelligences within a place, and with the intention of learning to be in conversation with the landscape, perceiving oneself beyond the self as part of the land.
This multi-sensorial listening is a mutual, listening to the landscape listening to oneself in return. Anything we touch is touching us back.
Becoming with or dancing the body-landscape song
Through this mutual listening, sensing, smelling and seeing, as well as the sensing of one’s body and movement, and the sensing of the vibrations of one’s voice, a space is opened for a transpersonal transformation, allowing a co-becoming with the land.
“working with the body as material of the in- between and in collaboration”
– Salome Voegelin
By way of this reciprocal multi-sensorial listening to the land, dwelling in its vibrant ecologies – its deep time, present pluralities and possibilities – we enter a dance with the multi-sensorial song of the land. The word enchantment comes from the French word “chanter”, meaning “to sing”. We hence allow the affect of the sensory dance with the land to express itself through our voices as a gift back to the landscape; a form of vibrational massage. A relational sounding and singing with the song of the landscape. Through this sensing, feeling, moving and voicing with, we enter the dancing the body-landscape song.
We primarily do the dancing the body-landscape song practice on the boulders; the piles of left over rocks from open pit mining covered by moss.
Coda or the senses as political
Inspired by Bayo Akomolafe’s claim that the senses are political, we approach listening as a political act, which also consists of deliberatively going out to listen to voices beyond the dominant power positions, such as listening to marginalised voices and to the more-than-human.
Listening to the landscape’s pluralities and possibilities, hearing the dense multiplicity of its mobile production, allows us to challenge the singularity of actuality and articulate a different sense of place and a different sense of self that lives in those possibilities and shows us how else things could be.
– Sonic Possibilities of Sound, by Salome Voegelin
Epilogue or reflecting with deep time on extractivism
My interest in deep time, which is geological time, involves widening awareness and imagination to a terrestrial scale and history, and to a long-term thinking. We attempt to discern the near and the far in space and time to trace connections and gather information to recompose possible meanings. Deep time helps us consider the movement of and between matter that is not only near or far, but co-constituted. Listening to deep time could reveal the “first musical notes of worlds to come” (by Bayo Akomolafe).
Doing that practice in the Minett, the land with the ghosts of extractive capitalism, beyond engaging with the more-than-human and deep time, invites reflection on the harm of extractive capitalism, which has not stopped but rather increased and displaced to cheaper places with less environmental and human rights regulations, or where these are not respected.
Influences
The research is inspired by political ecology (such as the work of Jane Benett), new materialism, post-human feminism (Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway) and eco-feminism, as well as by de-colonialism, body-land/site artistic and creative practices, and engagements with and reflections on listening and sounding. The work is also inspired by certain indigenous cosmologies such as by the Belyuen Aboriginal notion of the Dreaming, as written in the article “Do Rocks Listen” by Elizabeth Povinelli, and by the work on relationality by Lauren Tynan, a trawlwulwuy woman from lutruwita/Trouwerner/Tasmania, and a PhD candidate and Lecturer in the Discipline of Geography and Planning.
Intended development of terre rouge, I listen with you
This research is expected to develop through being shaped into a long-term participatory project into 2025 and beyond. This will involve regular walk-and-work-shops in the Minett as different chapters on its themes and quests/questions.
Who and what so far Terre Rouge, I listen with you has the support of a research grant from the Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg, and is created in exchange with Alexandra Baybutt, Christine Sollie, Salome Voegelin, the land and others. April 2024: 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 its current regeneration. May 2024: I shared the research and the sounding-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. 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)
How you can help I am researching local literature, saga and folk songs speaking or singing about the Minett land, interested in how the land was perceived and whether there is some animistic vein, as well as whether there is some expression of gratefulness and thanksgiving. If you have any related information or suggestions, they would be very welcomed. In that case, thank you for contacting vibrantmatterproductions@gmail.com.
Thank you for listening