By Harry Reddick (k cidder)
‘until the darkness departs the depot’ is a sonic art piece composed of original text and sound, interview fragments, and processed, interwoven field recordings taken within museum spaces, the Rijksmuseum conservation depot in Amersfoort and heritage locations across Amsterdam and Italy. The piece is an ‘ecological narrative of the museum’, in which various narratives that intertwine within the museum are represented – and then placed into contact with the unruly teeming multitudes that is ‘the ecological’ (inasmuch as it is even worth trying to represent this). Transitional sections were intentionally left abrupt and uncomfortable, as this feels more in keeping with the unruliness of ecology. The different layers of narrative that I attempt to represent here have different relationships to power, as I believe any work on changing the museum sector must primarily concern itself with imbalances in power. In the first, longer part of this piece there are initially three subdivided layers:
- (a satirised conglomerate representing) the corporatised, depoliticised museum sector, and empty commitments to climate and social justice which are strongly undermined by their brand and funding partnerships. As has been indicated in our article, this is implied as the endpoint of the extractive, colonial and capitalist logic that brought the museum as it is broadly understood into being today.
- The concerns of a well-intentioned and ethically-minded curatorial team in the face of climate disaster. This takes the form of a public-facing event in which some of the right things seem to be being said, but the message – however ‘progressive’ – is distorted and unclear, seemingly dropping out at times, as those in charge of collections seem to struggle with the enormity of the question that is their relationship to overarching power structures, through the work that the museum does.
- A layer in which the microbes and other ecologies that allow for the production of ‘cultural objects’ (such as, following Dominguez Rubio, Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ in the NYC MoMA) are represented. Obviously, using language (particularly English), text, recording and audio technology, narrative, and so on to ‘represent’ ecology is in itself a contradictory fool’s errand. But I wanted to create something which at least attempts to show the teeming, breathing, endlessly mutating, multiplying and subdividing aliveness of ecology, as it (/they ?) initially clings onto the bare structures of human narratives, but soon overwhelms and distorts them, seemingly with no fixed point of central agency.
The final section sees these distinct layers merge with one another. It is comprised of three different poems recorded in three different locations, then combined into a single triptych poem, as a way of representing the necessarily complicated, overlapping, and multi-directional nature of narrative when ecologisation is permitted onto it. Again we have three layers:
- [the urges and the tails of progress] (written and recorded on top of a hill):
the colonial mindset of exploration, extraction, ap/expropriation, and domination, with little regard for the historical legacy of such toxic actions.
- [the questions of the conserver] (written and recorded in the ruin of an abandoned country house awaiting restoration):
the delicate nature of the questions which curators must consider. The implications of such questions relate to power relationships between themselves, and the previous and following layer.
- [against monologic hegemonies/swirling constancy/meaningless everythings] (written and recorded in the ‘cantina’ basement of a vineyard farmhouse, next to huge vats of bubbling and fermenting grape musts):
Inspired by our interview with Aram Lee, who described ‘ninety-five microbes living in museums found in leaked water on the wall of the museum, vibrating, pulsing and expanding.’ Lee’s work, (as, I hope, does ours) links the politically oppressed with the ecological, in which those with the least tangible political power – those that are deemed meaningless to the march of progress – are also subject to the same processes of control, displacement, and domination that the colonial (and the museum as an extension of that) imposes upon the web of the non-human. (See more).
Ecologisation makes a mockery of narratives comprehensible to the human. Lee, discussing one of her films, said “there is no “arrival” to or from a fixed point, only the constant inextricable journeying of cultures and peoples; but also maybe not only conceptually but literally, the displacement of climate, and migration of nature and culture”. This formed part of the inspiration for the overlapping triptych form of the final poem(s), and the way in which it seems to become overwhelmed by itself, and have the individual narratives collapse under the weight of their interlocking momentums, undermining the notion of a linear progression of time. As Lee puts it, discussing microbes, ‘these living cultures have their own movements and will. These unruly movements and their performativity are significant because they’re the uncontrollable others, the unruly knowledge, they are empowerment.’ The empowerment of the unruly (both human and non-human) feels, to me, like a key part of attempts to destabilise the narratives of the colonial that have for so long dominated our colonial and neoliberal present.
I used certain specific tools and plug-ins within the Ableton software, as a way of manipulating my voice, in order to achieve this intended effect of a destabilised narrative across a non-linear distribution of time. (Again, it is worth saying, this will always necessarily be a failure, as it is an attempt to ‘represent’ the non-human with ontologies, methodologies and technologies entirely grounded in the human. It is even possibly a cliched attempt as such, like reaching for a kind of ‘experimental weirdness’ sonic aesthetic and saying ‘there, that’s what the weirdness of ecology is like’. Nonetheless, it is my attempt). Broadly, the effects used on my voice were different modulations of delay and echo, as well as pitch-shifting. This was an attempt to, again, make the ‘thoughts’ of the microbial feel multitudinal, rather than emerging from a single source. This disruption of the idea of a single source of knowledge is also representative of the museum as being perceived as bastions and creators of knowledge and paradigms, which Rubio, again, subverts in his work Still Life.
As well as in-built Ableton reverbs and the Voice Doubler plug-ins, I used the Valhalla Supermassive delay (specifically for its capacity to manipulate sounds so as to feel incomprehensibly huge and constrictingly tiny). At points, the ‘dry’ signal (the part of the speech (in this case) that goes into the effects processor) of the delay arrives after the ‘wet’ signal (the part of the speech which comes out of the effectors processor), as if the elements of an ecological consciousness are constituted from endlessly reproducing entities whose agency appears to simultaneously be of the past, present and future. In this way, I see it is a continuation – and further subversion – of what has always been (part of) the intention of the museum: to understand the way in which the past can live in the present and future.
Colin Sterling 