Event

“Listening to the Earth: Doug Aitkens, Lotte Geeven, and their Mesopotamian Predecessors”

 Doug Aitkens’s Sonic Pavilion, installed at Inhotim, Brazil in 2009, and Lotte Geeven’s 2013-2014 The Sound of the Earth are two examples of contemporary artists interested in amplifying the murmurs and creaks resounding within the depths of the earth. Yet this practice dates back to the ancient world: archeological evidence at Tell Mozan, located in northern Syria, reveal deep pits that often include sculpted silver ears, ladders, and anthropomorphic vessels with distorted mouths as though in song or speech, foregrounding the importance of listening to the netherworld within Hurrian rituals. Keeping in mind these Mesopotamian precedents, this paper situates Aitkens’s and Geeven’s projects within the following two contexts and temporal scales: On one hand, Sonic Pavilion and The Sound of the Earth evoke the global seismic network, where seismic stations pick up waves of energy—often legible as sound—to identify distant earthquakes, illegal testing of nuclear weapons, or ice quakes at the earth’s poles— one of the clearest proofs of climate change. Simultaneously, Aitkens’s and Geeven’s projects harken back to a more ritualistic engagement with subterranean listening, revealing a transhistorical human desire to feel connected to the earth by tuning in to its energy. In Sonic Pavilion and The Sound of the Earth, sound becomes the means by which underground movement is translated into information of international warfare and climate change, while the psychoacoustic experience of the resonating amplification allows gallery visitors a chance to vibrate with the earth’s energy.