Venue: Aksioma Project Space, Ljubljana
Opening: 23 December 2024, 19:00
On view: 24 December 2024 – 6 January 2025, 12:00 – 18:00 (weekdays)
Performative guided tour: 6 January 2025, 17:00
deep time > shamanism / becoming animal > low-frequency vibrations > olfactory perception
In deep time, the Earth was exclusively a geophonic instrument. For more than nine-tenths of its history, spanning hundreds of millions of years, it was devoid of creatures communicating with sound. Animals communicated by sight, signals, touch, and smell (chemicals). According to the fossil record, the ancestor of tree crickets (crickets, cicadas, and other insects) was one of the earliest singers 270 million years ago. They communicated through sound waves transmitted through wood or leaves by vibrating organs in their bodies. We, the animals, still communicate today by creating drumming rhythms by beating on drums and vegetation. In the accelerated time loop, we are at a point of deciphering the meaning of non-human languages. Using machine learning, AI maps languages as graphical networks of interrelationships rather than translating individual concepts. Graphical representation has been used to discover that whales use phatic phrases and personal names and that bats often have gourmet conversations. Researchers into non-human languages are highly concerned about the possibility of communicating with other-than-human species before understanding the complexities of their cultures. Communicating with them must be subject to even higher ethical standards of non-interference than those applied in anthropology today, as we have learned from the tragic history of colonialism.
The olfactory sound installation and performance explore how we may understand non-human culture and “become an animal” in performative ways without violating the autonomy of other-than-human. Ethnoecologists suggest that the low-frequency shamanic drumming, which travels far due to the physical characteristic of long waves, was intended to do just that: to communicate with the environment non-intrusively and interact with each other without direct intervention. In his poetic and somewhat esoteric “Becoming Animal”, David Abram proposes an earthly cosmology that goes beyond the idea of the mind as a self-contained space in our minds. Thoughts are therefore not produced by the individual mind alone but are the result of multi-sensory perception and connection with the environment. Communication with non-human animals can be achieved through the intelligence of the body and the senses, even without intelligent technology. The installation internalises a search for less intrusive ways of communicating through the cultivation of a non-anthropocentric view and animal-oriented mythologies, in which the animals do not personify human qualities but we try to animalise/rewild ourselves.
The vocal organ (timbal) of the cicadas (the first singers) is disembodied in the form of drums. The reproduction of a phenomenon with altered size and sound duration proportions is not metaphorical. The reason for the enlargement of the organ is the adaptation/conversion of the organ to human proportions.
Concept and realisation: Ida Hiršenfelder
Bioplastics adviser: Sabina Suru
Concept for video: Urša Rahne
Head technician: Valter Udovičić
Coordination: Marcela Okretič
Special thanks: Ema Herlec, Aksioma Project Space, Aleš Hieng – Zergon, Rok Oblak and Vid Polončič (Delavnica LEVO), Dmitriy Morozov, Tatiana Kocmur and Borut Savski (Cirkulacija2), Jaka Babnik, Matej Stupica, Matija Hiršenfelder, Marko Vivoda (Pina), Primož Turnšek, Andrej Koruza (Krater), Neža Mekota and Tine Luk.
Supported by the Ministry for Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana – Department for Culture
Photos by Urša Rahne
“Under Pine Trees” is based on the “Translating Critters” workshop, at the Piet Zwart Institute (2022) as an offshoot of the Empathetic Atmosphere research on an emotional connection to geophonic entities through immersive sound. The multi-sensory installation will be the third in a series in which I explore the relationship between empathic sonority, immersive bodily perception and acoustic ecology, following “Hyperthermia” (2023) and “Spiral Fluctuations” (2024). An extension of the installation “Under Pine Trees” were two sound walks from the “Translating Critters” series, the Under Beech Trees (Jazz Cerkno, 2024) and Under Maple Trees (niansa, 2024). This installation is a continuation of the exploration of the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth, which I began with the ambisonic compositions “Voluminous Movement of the Watery Earth” and “Wind Will Blow Us Away“.