Climate | Sound | Action 2

Programme Notes

Sarah Angliss – Schlieren Music: The Threads of the Air

In this audio-visual performance, air becomes far more than negative space. Schlieren imaging and high-speed video enable you see the eddies and currents of the air around the performers.

Sarah Angliss’ score sonifies these air movements and radically stretches the voice of singer Melanie Pappenheim, revealing inner details of her vocalisations and breath. As the musicians play, VJ Coco Das collides Schlieren images with coral-like SEM photos of the lungs and fragmented images of the city.

Air, an intangible, invisible resource, is one of our last remaining commons. Our dependence on it is absolute. Air can also be the carrier of contagions, particulates and excess heat – some of humanity’s gravest threats.

The title is inspired by the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century mystic and healer. Hildegard described fine threads that float through the air as summer transitions into autumn – threads she thought were purifying.

Purification in our performance is evoked by bells – instruments long associated with healing. As Sarah’s carillon creates a metallic haze of sound, Stephen Hiscock percusses handbells from Whitechapel. These were forged in 1856, the year of the first scientific paper relating the warming of the atmosphere to levels of carbon dioxide.

Abi Prián and Miki Corfiel – A tree’s memories

Composition and experimentation relates with territory and how it intersects with our identities and belonging. Thinking about all that happens nowadays in a capitalist and increasingly individualistic society, gentrification comes to our mind and how this affects the life quality of people from a territory. In Spain and Argentina, as it is happening in a lot of areas, hectares from national preserved parks get burned on purpose or they are sold to an entrepreneur to build new hotels for more tourists to come.

How does this affect our daily lives? Where does the memory of all those burned spaces and trees remain once they are gone?

This visual and musical duet tries to bring up the voices of some of these areas that are already thought to be demolished and sold to corporations before this happens, so we don’t forgive them as how they were in the future, using coding through open sources and in-site recorded sounds plus analogic instruments to tell you a story.

Gordon Delap – Ora Obscura

I started out here by capturing some fairly innocuous frames of plants and water and testing whether I could inject some instability. I initially thought of this composition as an exploration of the energy, restlessness, and even violence that can underly the surface tranquillity of nature. I wondered whether the attractive—though rather anodyne—images could be reframed as a kind of barrage of sound and image.

As the work progressed, I became additionally concerned with perspectives in documenting nature: the intrusion of poking cameras in places where they are unwanted, the unreliability in narration and lack of authenticity in the audio artifact, the way that the camera bounds its subjects of interest to the exclusion of the wider context.

Those boundaries were foregrounded here, and became drivers of the audiovisual discourse, where the work explores the edges of both audio and vision. The audio uses some well-trodden techniques used to produce sounds in—for instance—nature documentary, where audio material is often derived from the studio environment and after the fact. But here, the artifice collapses from time to time, and the human agency is revealed. The work concludes by floating free from a fixed perspective, although the enclosures never depart.

Hantao Li with Juice Shuting Cui – Natura 2040

‘Natura 2040’ draws its inspiration from Edward O. Wilson’s provocative Half-Earth theory, which reserving half of the planet as nature reserves to address the crises of ecological degradation and species extinction. The project envisions an alternative reality where the fictional organization Natura 2040 has compressed sprawling farmland into two 100-meter high walls that demarcate the boundaries between city and nature in the artificially constructed land of Flevopolder, Netherlands. This bold move leaves half of the polder to rewild, becoming an extension of the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve.

What does it mean to preserve nature on artificially constructed land? Is this still nature, or merely an artificial illusion? How can we reconcile the relationship between human-made infrastructures and the natural ecosystems they are meant to support? Are the potential consequences of such drastic interventions foreseeable? These questions are central to the film’s inquiry, challenging the audience to reflect on the impact of these interventions and the future they could forge.