Low Lying & Soil Séance Sessions V

A new commission by Michelle Atherton at Museum für Sepulkralkultur as part of the next instalment of In Between. You, life and finiteness Kassel, Germany 7 March – 10 August. The installation features a vinyl record, automatic turntable, headphones and a hammock. Visitors can lie in a leisurely state of suspension as they listen to the sounds from the ground. For centuries people across the planet have buried their dead, many believing that our ancestors continue to live on in the earth. Indeed, the very origin of the word ‘human’ might refer to ‘being of the earth’. The tracks on Soil Séance Sessions V document the frequencies from above and below ground, simultaneously transmitted via contact microphones attached to the earth through kitchen skewers. The album includes recordings made by the artist at FriedWald and Künstler-Nekropole and by members of the public who were invited to spend as long as they liked listening to the soil at Westfriedhof and Hauptfriedhof during the summer of 2024 Soils have no clear boundary. They hold mutable spaces, constantly shifting and changing over time. Soils have a genesis and a lifespan. The earth erodes boundaries and separations, not least through constant climatic action, rot and shifting regeneration. Soils defy the modern dualisms between nature and culture, the living bios and the non-living matter of geos. They trouble modern temporal divides between past, present and future. Sound is not matter, it is energy, registering in these recordings how matter is variously worked. Underground it is difficult to tell from where a sound travels. Loudness does not necessarily mean proximity. Above ground we may use sound to navigate but below ground this soil-sonic space is amorphous, imprecise. Low Lying & Soil Séance Sessions V presents a provocation to audiences to shift their auditory perceptions down to the ground. To use acoustic devices as portals to the underworld, where hidden actions, processes and movements are transformed into energies, transmuting into sonic apparitions through vibratory matters. This installation extends and deepens the artistic research project Ecstatic Rot, project investigating how our relationships with transience, decomposition and re-composition may be understood as more-than-human activity, through experimental artistic audio methods. https://www.sepulkralmuseum.de/EN/exhibitions/archive/inbetween-2.0