ESSAY—THERE MUST BE A LITTLE SNIFFING FIRST

I submerge myself, and I recommend you do the same. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here. I jumped in and can no longer find the exit. The world outside feels far away. I wonder how long they have been here. How long have I been here?

The Portuguese archive, composer Nuno Lobo tells me about sounds like a dream destination. A place to submerge yourself. The archive is filled with folk songs and exists as a website that uses a world map to show the origins of the music. “I can lose myself in it for hours,” he says. I move from an open clearing where a man with a guitar sings beside a tree, to a living room where three people sit on sofas and sing as well. The space fills with voices rich with folklore. I want to sing along. I don’t understand the words, but I feel them. 

Folk music, or folklore, is important to Gaia D’Arrigo, Felix Bell and Nuno Lobo, the three makers of the exhibition What’s Left Speaks. Together they explore a fictional, post-human future scenario in this exhibition. A world far beyond human life.
Each of them has their own practice. For a working period at Das Leben am Haverkamp, they bring these together. The artist, designer and composer jointly build a dystopian future that is as unsettling as it is alluring. Dystopian scenarios resemble the tension of horror films. You hardly dare to look, yet you do not want to miss anything. It is sensational and non-binding at the same time.

Felix describes the exhibition as a “total scenography”. A space that fully envelops you. Before entering, a world is imagined through a fictional story they have written. After reading it, I step inside and that world becomes tangible; I am standing right in the middle of it. The space feels somewhat mysterious. Several figures are arranged throughout. You can walk around them or sit down beside one. They look like mutated speakers and seem as if they want to speak to one another. Over the past decades, these beings have made themselves at home here. I stand in a world that, through its new inhabitants, casts a gaze back at humanity.

What’s Left Speaks allows me to submerge. To plunge under in a story means I connect with it emotionally. I surrender and open myself up. Stories and myths are important to the three makers. “Relating yourself to another reality gives you the possibility of positioning yourself in the world,” Felix explains. Losing yourself in another world is not simply an act of escape. Disappearance can enable you to imagine daily reality differently.

Once inside the space, you are free to explore intuitively. I greet the figures present as though encountering another animal. There must be a little sniffing first; a mutual testing of whether the other likes you too, Felix says. There are not many places left on earth where humans do not dominate. Where you truly feel you are a visitor in the realm of other-than-human life.

All right, plunging under again.

Nuno begins to speak about mountains. A result of chaos, he says. That is how he sees this work for the exhibition as well. A series of events beyond my presence as a visitor led to this post-apocalyptic space. As Nuno speaks of mountains, Felix tells me about rocks in dark caves, and Gaia shows me stones. During my visit to her studio, she brings me a plastic container filled with a black material. Volcanic rock, I think. Metal residue, it turns out. “If you touch it, maybe don’t rub your eyes afterwards,” she advises.

This “stone” has not endured as endlessly as the rocks or trees Felix and I fantasise about. In the café where I meet him, we wonder what the tree in the city square we are overlooking must have seen and experienced. Children running across the market, a first kiss, a war, a dropped shopping bag, drunken friends, weeds between the paving stones. Where Felix’s tree is a non-human witness to centuries of human comings and goings, Gaia’s new stone is the product of toxic human action. A recently developed souvenir (or fossil?) of our time. Not much lived through yet.

I do not know what caused us to disappear. No one knows, and I can no longer ask. Submerge. I am (in a fictional story you may choose what you are) a cockroach. Fairly indestructible, I think. I am a cockroach and an archaeologist. The latter I did not yet know; I was not looking for anything.

I stumble upon this space as a visitor, just like you. Like the trees in the square, the beings in this room stand still while the world around them moves. Once they came into being, but like the mountains it happened without you seeing it. Some of the beings stand upright; others lie on the ground or hang from the ceiling. Over the years, they have taken shape.

The beings' body parts resemble skeletons and organs, veins and teeth. Body parts I recognise from my own body. Some have hair; others a sticky latex skin. The recognisable speaker components give the beings horn-like mouths with rows of sharp, bared teeth. These wide-open mouths have a glazed exterior. This glossy layer, like the entire exhibition, carries an ambiguity: attractive to look at, yet made from toxic metal residue. Gaia collaborates with ceramicist Benedetta Pompili to transform the “stones” into this glaze, giving the beings a skin. Fitting, the artist finds, because if our species becomes extinct, we will certainly leave toxic materials (and other trash) behind in the world.

Immersed in What’s Left Speaks, I find myself inside an archive. Not an orderly collection, but the outcome of years of transmitted sound. The choir is formed by these figures scattered throughout the space. From behind rows of pointed teeth comes singing. Some characters are soft and low in tone. They are complemented by more present, shifting voices. Sniffing first, do not forget. The various characters sound electronic and organic at once. We must grow accustomed to one another. I do not understand what they are singing about, yet I recognise something of my own voice in it. Over the years their voices, like what they sing, have taken shape. It is an amplified whisper game. As for centuries, stories here too have been endlessly retold and sung.

“We imagine that they once began by imitating humans and machines,” Nuno explains. How does a whisper game of this magnitude begin? In our sometimes dystopian present, I wonder what this future folklore concerns. Do these beings sing about things I recognise? Love, sorrow, joy?

Through the work of Gaia, Felix and Nuno, I find myself wondering which stories we choose to (re)tell and which to preserve. A voice can be recorded, stored and replayed, but the tissue of a voice (the feeling, the mysticism, the collectivity) cannot easily be archived. That same tissue ensures that my body is not merely a vehicle for my voice, but a fusion of the two. Nor is the speaker an empty shell into which sound lands and from which it departs. Felix, speaker designer, sees faces in speakers. They possess something bodily, he thinks. He has mastered the craft of designing and building speakers and considers it an indispensable part of constructing this fictional world. The technology (body) of the speaker merges seamlessly with the sound of the voices. I am as much a body as they are.

A breath in, plunging under again.

Composer Nuno speaks of his desire for people to burst spontaneously into song every day. Hollywood has ruined me. I hate musicals and am irritated by everyone suddenly singing about banal things. Yet what Nuno wants, I want too. He describes labourers singing together and the power of song to unite people. As a composer, he often works with choirs. An ultimate form of togetherness in the moment, he says. It feels genuine to him, standing side by side without instruments and using only your voice. Tissue, I think. I wonder whether this “genuineness” relates to expression. Where the voice is an expression of being human here and now. A lived experience. When does an event feel unreal?

As future archaeologists, we encounter these voices. Now that humanity is extinct, the voice feels like an artefact. Perhaps somewhere halfway through the whisper game, the voice shifts from expression to artefact.

Perhaps we move in and out of choirs more often than we realise. A protest in the street as a choir, a quarrelling dinner table as a choir, a collective mantra in a yoga class as a choir. The protest in the street, besides a collective voice, also comes with choreography, Felix and I discover. In his own search for how activism takes shape in his life, the idea of a choir brings relief. Constantly imagining another world requires energy. When your voice is tired, you can step back; the choir carries the sound. Recharged, you can join in again, allowing space for another voice to rest. Exhaustion, too, can lead to extinction.

I hope that when everything falls away, we come together (in a choir). “They are trying to find one another in the dark.” What Felix describes about these beings applies as much to this dystopian future as to our current society. Only losing seems closer to us than finding. We are clumped islands drifting on water, rarely plunging under into stories that truly matter.

What’s Left Speaks appeals to my sense of responsibility. If this is the future, which folk songs are heard here? Which stories have been whispered on? With the voice as humanity’s artefact, I think of all the voices we do not get to hear. Those silenced, suppressed or erased voices. The deep-rooted need for folklore becomes painfully relevant in times of hatred and exclusion.

The three makers agree: stories must be retold and songs resung. Stories that arise from lived experience. Stories offer the possibility of positioning yourself, of placing yourself in the world. The dystopian world of What’s Left Speaks feels like a rehearsal space for the future, in which we realise what our voice is worth.

I want to join the choir. My mouth wide open, all my teeth on show.

Read more about he exhibition 'What's left speaks' here.

Author: Wietske Flederus
Editor: Laure van den Hout (Mister Motley)

Supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Gemeente Den Haag.