64 minute read
SUSTAINABILITY/ECOLOGY
SUSTAINABILITY/ECOLOGY REEDOCATE ME! ON THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION
In the 9th century, extensive forest clearing in Central America causes drops in precipitation and a catastrophic drought, leading to the collapse of the highly developed Mayan culture. On Easter Island in the 13th century, major deforestation brings about soil erosion, and food shortages ultimately cause the collapse of the entire island’s native culture.1 Although there are numerous cases throughout history of civilisations collapsing due to environmental destruction, examples of successful transformation are much harder to find. One such example is the Japanese Edo period. For 250 years, Japan successfully managed its economy without any external supply of energy and resources. Based on the historical model of the Edo period, the interdisciplinary symposium ReEDOcate ME!, which took place in January 2022 at the Akademie der Künste and the GoetheInstitut Tokyo, examined the scope for conceptualising and shaping ecological transformation.
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Christian Tschirner
Act in a way, writes Hans Jonas in his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility, that the implications of your actions are compatible with the permanence of real human life on Earth. Over forty years later, five years after the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement, it is now evident that, in terms of a response to the environmental crisis, the adopted measures are neither sufficient nor are they even being implemented. Despite the realisation that our civilisation is at stake, there is an enormous gap between knowledge and action. And although the arts, with their broad societal influence, could have an important role to play in this process, the necessary transformation processes are slow to get off the ground. The title of the symposium plays on the term re-education, the programme initiated by the United States government after the Second World War, which sought to use education, art, literature, and entertainment to attain an intellectual denazification of Germany (and Japan). Cultural programmes such as podium discussions, film screenings, radio dramas, and travelling exhibitions were employed to displace authoritarian, racist attitudes and draw on humanistic traditions in order to stimulate a positive relationship to democracy. The only way to save ourselves, according to the theory, is through a fundamental process of relearning and rethinking that also aims to radically transform our day-to-day culture. But what role could the arts play in this process?
The unique Japanese path of the Edo period began in the 17th century. At the time, Japan increasingly perceived the colonial ambitions of the major European powers as a threat, and a rebellion of Christian farmers and Samurai in 1639 provided the justification for a ban on Christianity and a prohibition on all contact with the outside world. This draconian self-isolation combined with a feudal construction boom led not just to an acute lack of energy and resources: brought on by large-scale forest clearing, flooding, drought, and food shortages became an increasingly common occurrence.2 For Japanese society, this marks the beginning of an experiment. Starting in the mid-18th century and powered by the widespread use of fossil fuels, the industrialisation of the Western world heralded a radical change for humanity, but Japan asserted its independence by forgoing the external supply of energy and resources. Because the islands of Japan have no significant coal reserves, this meant operating almost exclusively on the power of the sun. Other than iron and a few other metals, only sustainable, plantbased materials were used, the production rate of which is limited by the natural growth of plants, meaning there was never a surplus of material. Thus, long before such concepts become commonplace in the West, the solution developed during the Edo period was an elaborate system of recycling and repair. At the same time, a dedicated reforestation and soil-enrichment programme began, under which the feudal government collaborated with private forestry companies in a kind of joint venture.3 Despite a relatively high population density (approximately twice as high as today’s worldwide population density), Japan succeeded in expanding the forested areas on the islands and increasing the soil yields of farmland. And although there were recurring episodes of famine due to crop failures, the overall standard of living and quality of life in Japan was higher than that of other Asian or Western countries. Fuelled by the increases in agricultural productivity, an extremely vibrant urban culture developed. The literacy rate was also significantly higher than that of European countries of the time, and skilled crafts flourished along with the arts,4 resulting in the creation of products of the Edo culture that, to this day, are considered archetypally Japanese. The origin of these products is in the acute shortage of resources: tatami mats, kimonos, paper walls, and even sushi, bear witness to the need to conserve resources and save energy in everyday life.
The Japan of the Edo period was an agricultural society. Obviously, it is neither possible nor desirable to return to a pre-industrial form of society. However, it is also
Azby Brown, “Samurai House and Garden”, from Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, 2010.
clear that – if we hope to survive as a civilisation – we must adjust our use of resources to a level that approaches the pre-industrial period as much as possible, which is why it is all the more interesting to look to historical examples. Thus, in a world facing limited and dwindling resources, the Edo period can serve as a model. The Eurocentric narrative of progress, however, almost reflexively negates any question of limiting consumption, which has a problematic effect. How we understand “economy”, “progress”, and “development” and, as a result, how we reflect on the society’s past and future, is profoundly shaped by fossil capitalism. The view of progress this proliferates, narrowed down to technical innovation, economic growth, and globalisation, prevents the development of sustainable economic models.5 These perspectives, however, may be fundamentally inherent to our economic system itself. A capitalism without technological innovation and growth seems unthinkable; at least, it has been without precedent until now. According to the journalist Ulrike Herrmann, the end of fossil fuels and the introduction of a circular economy would be tantamount to the end of capitalism: “In a carbonneutral economy, millions of employees would have to fundamentally reorient themselves; in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, for example, many more people would be needed in agriculture and in the forests.”6 Very little money would be earned under such a model, however.
But since a large part of today’s energy consumption is attributed to structures that provide basic social services, sustainability cannot be attained through re-education of individuals, for example, by appealing to citizens to curtail consumption or similar initiatives. Instead, legislation and regulations are required. Here too, it is worth looking back on the Edo period.7
As Michel Serres writes, “Our fundamental relationship with objects comes down to war and property. […] The sum total of harm inflicted on the world so far equals the ravages a world war would have left behind.”8 The internalised logic of growth that has led to this state of war is also apparent in the debates taking place in the field of art. A necessary transformation is often equated with renunciation and asceticism or is even seen as an attack on artistic freedom. But European architects of modernity themselves – including Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, or Werner Düttmann, the architect of the Academy building on Hanseatenweg – borrowed from the reduced aesthetic of Japanese Edo architecture. Thus, the imperative of reduction clearly led to a refined use of materials and a particular aesthetic sensuality.9 This leads to the question of whether the principles of reduction, simplification, reuse, and deceleration can encourage innovations in artistic production and under what circumstances this can be achieved. At the ReEDOcate ME! festival planned for October 2022 at the Floating University Berlin, artists including Michikazu Matsune, Toshiki Okada, Andreas Kreiner, Nagara Wada, Akira Takayama, Metis Arts, raumlabor, Christophe Meierhans, Sachiko Hara, and les dramaturx are going to develop their own formats to seek answers to this very question. Whereas in historical Japan, legal norms apparently brought about social and artistic innovation, the festival aims instead to create impetuses for society and politics.
For Japan the Edo period ended in a traumatic development. On 8 July 1853, four American gunboats entered the harbour of Edo, today’s Tokyo. The sight of the black plumes of smoke that these ships emitted and the ships’ ability to manoeuvre without wind and sail were met with shock. During the Edo period, Japan had even abandoned the further development of firearms, a technology that had been imported from Europe and which had been employed in the civil wars of the 16th century. This was an unprecedented case of a highly developed military power giving up a superior technology and returning to the use of traditional weapons. For 250 years, the country had not experienced a war, and with the arrival of the four gunboats, Japan’s military and technological infe-
riority became strikingly clear. Matthew Perry, the American commander of the ships, refused to leave the harbour and threatened to destroy Edo with his artillery power. He carried with him a letter from the President of the United States demanding the opening of Japanese harbours to American merchant ships, stressing that the United States would only accept a positive response. One year later, he returned with eight warships to impose the “Treaty of Peace and Amity” on Japan, which marked the end of the Edo period and thus Japan’s unique 250year path. Treaties with other Western powers followed – among them the Prussian-Japanese trade treaty of 1861. Japan became not only part of a globalised, capitalist economy, it also embarked on an unprecedented race to make up for the country’s technological deficits vis-á-vis the Western colonial powers. The country secured the necessary resources for this endeavour – completely in keeping with the Western model – through the colonising of Korea and Manchuria.
1 See Adam Voiland and Maria José-Viñas, “Ancient Dry
Spells Offer Clues About the Future of Drought”, NASA
Features (published online 5 December 2011) on the
Pre-Columbian Collapse of the Maya: “Warum die Maya-
Kultur unterging” (“Why Maya culture disappeared”),
Focus (published online 24 February 2012);
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Penguin, 2011). 2 Professor Yuko Tanaka at the Symposium ReEDOcate ME! 3 Daigo Kosakai at the symposium ReEDOcate ME! 4 Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1999). 5 Matthias Schmelzer at the symposium ReEDOcate ME! 6 Ulrike Herrmann in her lecture at the symposium ReEDOcate
ME!, see also Ulrike Herrmann’s article in this issue. 7 Michaela Christ at the symposium ReEDOcate ME! 8 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth
MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 32. 9 Fritz Frenkler and Azby Brown at the symposium
ReEDOcate ME!
ReEDOcate ME! Concept: Benjamin Baldenius-Förster, Aljoscha Begrich, Christian Tschirner, Makiko Yamaguchi Production management: Elisa Leroy With: Azby Brown, artist, architect, author; Nicholas Bussmann, composer; Michaela Christ, head of diachronic transformation research at the Norbert Elias Center for Transformation Design & Research of the European University Flensburg; eat&art taro, artist; Fritz Frenkler, industrial designer, Director of the Architecture Section at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Ulrike Herrmann, economics journalist and author; Toshikatsu Ienari, architect, dot architects; Daigo Kosakai, curator at the Edo-Tokyo Museum; Bastian Reiber, actor and director; Sampo Inc, architects; Matthias Schmelzer, economic historian and climate activist; Yuko Tanaka, president of Hosei University, Tokyo; Andres Veiel, film and theatre director; Nagara Wada, author and artist
A cooperation between the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Goethe-Institut Tokyo, the Japan Foundation, Kyoto Experiment Festival, the Schaubühne Berlin, and Floating UniversitY Berlin
Azby Brown, “What Happens to a Demolished Building?”, from Just Enough.
CHRISTIAN TSCHIRNER is head of dramaturgy at the Schaubühne Berlin. After training as an animal keeper at Leipzig Zoo, he studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Since then, he has worked as an actor, author, director, and dramaturg.
14.–23.10.2022 Floating UniversitY Berlin ReEDOcate ME! Festival Performance, lecture, discussion, participation https://reedocate-me.com
THE END OF CAPITALISM
Climate protection can only succeed if growth comes to an end. What can be learned from the of the coronavirus pandemic – and from the British war economy of 1940? A contribution to ReEDOcate ME!
Ulrike Herrmann
The coronavirus pandemic made the unthinkable thinkable: from one day to the next, planes stopped flying, greenhouse gas emissions dropped rapidly, oil prices plummeted, and many countries introduced a kind of universal basic income. The government had the final say in all areas, and even the neoliberals were suddenly demanding billion-dollar economic stimulus packages. It seemed like the end of both globalisation and unbridled capitalism, almost as if a path toward greater sustainability had been found.
That impression, however, is deceiving. Rather than showing how to put capitalism behind us, the coronavirus crisis proves, on the contrary, that our economic system is doomed towards growth. Although in most countries the lockdown lasted only a few weeks, the damage it inflicted amounts to trillions of dollars. Without the successive stimulus programmes launched by the public sector to stabilise the economy, many companies would have long gone bankrupt and nearly all their employees would be without a job.
The trick right now is simply to “print” new money by borrowing from the government. The coronavirus crisis is, in the truest sense of the word, being buried with money. The European Union mobilised over a trillion euros, while Germany has accrued a deficit of 500 billion euros so far. It is impossible to pay off such enormous debt. Instead, the fallback solution is growth. As soon as economic output rises, the debt will lose relevance – until it is eventually forgotten.
Just one problem remains: the environmentalists are right when they say there cannot be infinite growth in a finite world. The carbon footprint left by European countries, including Germany, is as big as if there were three planets to consume; as we all know, however, there is only one planet Earth.
So far, governments have been hoping to somehow achieve a long-term reconciliation between the economy and the environment. The buzzwords are “Green New Deal” or “decoupling” of growth and energy.
Saving the world would even be cheap, they say. Most studies assume that sensible climate protection would only cost one to two per cent of gross domestic product at most. If it can be achieved virtually for free, it begs the question: why is so little being done in the area of environmental policy? There must be a flaw in this logic somewhere.
To uncover this flaw, it’s worth looking at the CO₂ tax recently introduced in Germany, which is supposed to be at the heart of this country’s climate policy. In 2021, the surcharge was at €25 per ton of CO₂; by 2025, this price will increase to €55, before settling at a level of €55 to €65.
Critics complain, above all, that the tax is much too low. The Federal Environment Agency calls for a CO₂ price of €180 per ton. To translate these abstract numbers into the real world: one litre of diesel would then cost around 50 cents more.
That’s a lot of money. But unfortunately, the old maxim “more is better” does not hold true. Such “climate taxes” would not in fact help the environment. Because no matter how high the energy taxes are, the money remains in the system. Even though citizens would have to dig deeper into their pockets to pay for their energy use, their money ends up with the state, which is then free to spend it, thereby generating more demand and producing new CO₂ emissions. The OECD has already established that “there is no clear link between a country’s emissions and its energy tax”.
This finding holds true as well if energy taxes are levied in a socially equitable way. In Germany, for example, there are calls for the government to forgo the revenue from the CO₂ tax and pay households a kind of “energy allowance”. Poor families would profit, as they consume less energy, while the rich would pay more. As fair as such a redistribution would be, households would have just as much money as before overall, which they could use for flights, for driving their cars, or for streaming the Internet.
Politicians confuse business and economics: a higher CO₂ price has a steering effect, but only for the individual product. Meanwhile, the general economy is being steered further towards the climate catastrophe. The German people are falling into the trap commonly known as the rebound effect. Described as early as 1865 by the British economist William Stanley Jevons, this paradox is one of the few predictions about capitalism that has turned out to be correct. If you conserve energy or save on raw materials, thus producing the same amount of goods with less material input, actually productivity increases and enables new growth.
In environmental policy, thus, relying solely on prices and market mechanisms makes little sense. Politicians know this too. The great hope, therefore, is to be able to completely switch the entire economy – from the transport sector to industry to heating – to green electricity.
But this idea sounds good only if you remain in denial about the obvious problems. Although it runs on green electricity, an electric car is by no means environmentally friendly once you take the car’s resource-heavy production into account. Moreover, green electricity does not come from nowhere, but also has follow-up costs. Although wind turbines are not nearly as harmful to the environment as coal-fired power plants, they also encroach on the landscape and quickly become a problem of waste. After all, wind turbines only operate for a maximum of thirty years, after which point they become an industrial wreck consisting of 90 metres of scrap metal. The question of how to recycle the used rotor blades remains completely unclear.
But above all: green electricity will always remain scarce. This statement may seem strange, given that the Sun sends 10,000 times more energy to the Earth than its seven billion inhabitants would need, even if each of them did enjoy the European standard of living. There is no shortage of physical energy, but it would be naïve to assume that green electricity could be available in abundance.
Solar energy is useless until it is captured. Solar panels and wind turbines, however, are technologically complex – at least significantly more complex than extracting and burning coal, oil, or gas. For now, green electricity is competitive because it replaces “only” fossil electricity – and because it enjoys preferential treatment. The balance immediately worsens once the green electricity needs to be stored and put to use throughout the economy. One very telling unit is the “harvest factor” EROI, which measures how many units of energy must be invested in order to gain new energy units. It turns out that green electricity can supply a maximum of half the net energy that can be generated with fossil fuel
Azby Brown, “Rice Production and Its Byproducts”, from Just Enough.
variants. That is a bitter truth, because it proves not only how expensive green electricity is, but also that energy efficiency would fall by half. As soon as productivity falls, however, there can no longer be growth. If it is powered by green electricity alone, the economy will have to shrink.
But what would such a shrinking look like? It helps to think it through from the end. If green electricity remains scarce, then a carbon-neutral economy is only conceivable if you do without all air travel and private cars. Banks and insurance companies also become largely superfluous in a shrinking economy. The same applies to PR consultants, travel agencies, logistic specialists, and graphic designers.
In a carbon-neutral economy, nobody would go hungry – but millions of employees would need reorientation. There would be no lack of work: to mitigate the impacts of climate change, far more people would have to work in agriculture or in forestry, for example. But these jobs would not generate the same amount of real income because there is less to buy in a shrinking economy.
Such a prospect for the future may seem radical, but it is quite literally “without alternative”. Unless we reduce our CO₂ emissions to net zero we will end up in a “hot phase”, which in and of itself would bring about a shrinking of the economy. Such a period of unplanned chaos would likely lead to a free-for-all fight that our democracy would not survive.
The dismantling of capitalism must take place in an orderly fashion. Luckily, there is a historical model that we can look to for direction: the British war economy beginning in 1940. At the time, the British faced an immense challenge. Caught more or less off guard by the Second World War, the British government had to completely adapt the economy to the war effort while ensuring that the population did not face food shortages.
The first consequence was a statistical revolution: the national accounts system was created, which to this day is a standard instrument of all economists. This new tool made it possible to calculate how many factories could be used to produce military equipment without jeopardising supply to the civilian population.
The result was a capitalism without a market, which functioned surprisingly well. The factories remained in private hands, but the production targets for weapons and consumer goods were prescribed by the state – while food distribution was organised publicly. There were no shortages, but there was rationing. The Britons thus invented a private and democratic planned economy that had nothing in common with the dysfunctional socialism of the Soviet Union.
This form of state control was immensely popular. As the British government discovered as early as 1941, the rationing programme was “one of the greatest successes on the home front”. This form of prescribed egalitarianism turned out to be a blessing in disguise: during the war, of all times, the lower classes were better taken care of than ever before. In peacetime, one-third of the population of Britain had not been getting sufficient calories, and a further 20 per cent were at least partially malnourished. Now, amidst a war, the population was healthier than ever.
When it comes to tackling climate change, society faces a challenge of similar magnitude. Here too, the survival of humanity is at stake. And while there is not much to be learned from the coronavirus crisis, one lesson stands out: the state showed once more that it can react quickly and effectively. It must soon utilise this competence to facilitate an orderly exit from the growth model.
ULRIKE HERRMANN is an economics journalist with the newspaper taz. After completing her apprenticeship as a bank clerk, she studied history and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her most recent book, published in 2022, is Deutschland, ein Wirtschaftsmärchen. Warum es kein Wunder ist, dass wir reich geworden sind (“Germany, an economic fairy tale: Why it’s no wonder that we got rich”). This text is a slightly modified version of her lecture given for ReEDOcate ME! at the Akademie der Künste in January 2022.
COLONIAL Naomie Gramlich COPPER
In her video project Reflections of the Raw Green Crown, the artist Otobong Nkanga refers to the inseparability of Western architecture, media infrastructures, and extractivism. A long overdue denaturalisation of resources.
Otobong Nkanga, Reflections of the Raw Green Crown, 2015.
The three-minute video Reflections of the Raw Green Crown (2015) shows Otobong Nkanga with her back to the camera.1 Wearing a crown of roughly worked malachite, the artist stands facing the copper roofs of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church in Charlottenburg and the Gethsemane church in Prenzlauer Berg. Copper can be extracted from malachite. Nkanga recites a poem about the encounter between raw and processed copper that uncovers buried memories in the heart of Berlin, which in turn lead to the colonial past of Tsumeb, a town in Namibia. “You have travelled a long way through land and sea to crown the tops of your captor’s roofs. […] You remain silent and do not want to be traces for fear of the horror within. […] I am raw. A distinct cousin. But we are from the same core. […] Guessing that you might remember Tsumeb.”
The Otavi region in northern Namibia, where Tsumeb is located, was wellknown for its mineralogically unique and immensely large copper reserves. At the same time as the two churches were built, the area corresponding to presentday Namibia was annexed by the German Empire from 1884 to 1915. In the region around Tsumeb, the Khoisan and Damara communities mainly lived and worked, mining copper, and bartering it. Through the Germans, they were deprived of their wealth and their economy. Where a century earlier the “Green Hill” (as Tsumeb used to be called because of the malachite inclusions in the rock) once stood, there is now a gaping hole in the ground more than a 100 metres deep. By the time the mine closed in 1996, over 27 million tons of copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, silver, and germanium had been shipped to Germany, Belgium, and North America over a period of ninety years. In 1899, during the expansion of electricity for power, telegraphy, and telephony, German copper reserves were becoming scarce. To satisfy Europe’s insatiable hunger for copper, the “mining frontier”2 in the form of the German colonial administration wreaked havoc in Tsumeb from 1900 onwards. “The fear of the horror within”, as Nkanga says. A system of successive land grabs and slave-like working conditions was enforced. The precolonial technology and economy were destroyed, leaving poverty and ecological contamination as legacies. For Namibia, independent since 1990, there is little copper left, as its first president Sam Nujoma states.3
Nkanga makes use of the distorting video aesthetic of the fisheye lens, expanding the urban space to allow postcolonial connections to emerge. Colonial copper from Namibia, it can be speculated, is not only found in church roofs, but is also embedded within the walls of houses in electricity cables, keeps trams running, supplies whole cities with electricity, and – since copper is endlessly recyclable – also the Internet.
Tsumeb is not an isolated case, but part of a system of coloniality and colonialism through which resource-rich localities have been and continue to be seized, expropriated, and harnessed into a global network of capital and infrastructure, only to be sucked dry and spat out as ruins. Aluminium, tin, copper, gold, cobalt, silver, palladium, and dozens of other minerals provide the geological materiality enabling the storage, transmission, and dissemination of media technologies. These materials, brought forth by extractivist policies and infrastructures, are inextricably intertwined with media technologies. Those who see the latter exclusively as social mass media ignore that they are contributory factors to the “mass destruction”4 of ecologies and people, predominantly in countries of the Global South.
THE UNSPEAKABLE IN THE RESOURCE
Nkanga’s work is to be interpreted as a call to tell stories linking media technologies, infrastructures, and architectures in the Global North with places of exploitation. Nkanga calls them respectively “spaces of shine” and “places of obscurity”.5 Since both are directly related to each other and to colonialism and extractivism, they cannot be considered independently. And yet, drawing attention to the post- and neocolonial ancestry of resources seems almost platitudinous today. Pressing questions rarely arise from this. I therefore wish to take a
Otobong Nkanga, Reflections of the Raw Green Crown, 2015.
step back and ask: what are the imaginary worlds that enable Tsumeb to become “obscure” and the computer on which this text is written to become “shiny” in the first place? Or, in other words, how do colonial relations become naturalised in the (un)speakability of “resources”?
Discursive work What contributes to the failure to identify colonial links is the concept of the “resource” itself. Resources are not just stuff like cotton, copper, or oil, but are in fact tied to a certain line of thought that has its origins in colonialism and its history. At the same time as the African continent was being colonised, the terms “resource” and “raw material” emerged in Europe’s economic vocabulary.
Whereas before there was talk of “natural wealth” or “mineral riches”, “resources” and “raw materials” gave their names to the material basis of modern colonial societies. Etymologically, resource goes back to the three Latin components of “re” for “again”, “sub” for “from below”, and “regere” for “straighten”. At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of self-regenerating growth was transformed into something static to be discovered, classified, improved, and mobilised. Henceforth, this relationship dictates a universalistic approach to nature and displaces or incorporates other modes of relating ecologically, socially, or spiritually to economic existence. The history of the term “resource” describes how the in fact highly emotional topic of economic existence, embedded in dreams, imaginings, and ideas of power, identity, law, and gender, is increasingly objectified and rendered opaque by a scientific approach.
In the propaganda media of German colonial policy – maps, encyclopaedias, journals, and so on – also the term “raw material” emerges in contrast to technology. The binary system of “raw material” versus “technology” is inscribed with the geographical separation of the colony as the place of extraction, on the one hand, and the city as the place of processing, on the other. In turn, this geographical distinction embodies the temporal hierarchy of “primitive” versus “progressive”. This runs along the imagined axis of evolution from nature to culture and thus from a raw state to refinement. Since raw materials are “raw”, they exist exclusively in relation to a state of becoming that can only be unlocked by means of Western technology. The supposed incompleteness of raw materials serves to legitimise the Global North in making them tangible, useful, and profitable. In short, raw materials are conceived as “natural”, “primeval”, and “available”, which perpetuates the colonial imagination and ignores precolonial technologies and economies.
The history of the concept of “raw material” shows that material entities are embedded in discursive and cultural work that continues to provide the framework for individuals and societies in their thinking about material existence today.6 But what actually happens when “raw materials” are mentioned renders unspeakable the colonial violence that accompanies resource extraction. Anna L. Tsing writes: “the frontier has come as a shock and a disruption. [...] As [those who run the frontier] come in expectation of resources, and they can ignore how these resources are traumatically produced.”7 “Raw materials” perpetuate the shock of the mining frontier because its violence remains unspeakable in them. The concept resembles the term terra nullius or “no man’s land”, which suggests that the land in the colonies was uninhabited. Even the term “colonialism”, etymologically related to “cultivation”, is a euphemism for the regime of violence. Because these terms subsume and silence violence, they must themselves be comprehended as forms of epistemological violence.
“Race” and raw materials When Nkanga lends her body to the malachite and copper in Reflections of the Raw Green Crown, she states: “Surprisingly, you look like me. [...]. I am raw. A distinct cousin. But we are from the same core.” The kinship between the mineral and Black people to which she alludes is more than a metaphor. In her analysis of Nkanga’s work, Denise Ferreira da Silva has highlighted the colonial racist reconfiguration of Blackness that goes hand in hand with a negation of humanity and a reified materiality.8 Racism is the denial and reification of humanity to make people into supposedly easily extractable material for labour processes. In the transatlantic enslavement trade, it is no accident that the worth of Black people is expressed in gold and other precious metals and minerals.9 Thus there are parallels in the thinking about raw materials and “race”. Not only Blackness but also whiteness plays a pivotal role in Western (non-)thinking about raw materials.
It is no accident that Nkanga follows the trail of colonial copper from Tsumeb to two churches. It is no less accidental that symbols of divinity and transcendence are used at the beginning of the 20th century to conceive of electricity as immaterial. This is exemplified by the advertising illustrations of the electric company AEG. The “Goddess of Light”, the title of the illustration, not only outshines dark clouds, but also the entire globe with an electric light bulb and her white body modelled on classical ideals of beauty. What contributes to depicting electricity as immaterial, and thus rendering the colonial conditions of copper mining unspeakable, is the pictorial tradition of the Enlightenment, heightened here with the ideals of white femininity.
Whiteness is not skin pigmentation, but a modern ideal that also embodies the desire for transparency and cleanliness. Richard Dyer writes: “To be white is to have expunged all dirt, faecal or otherwise, from oneself: to look white is to look clean.”10 The application of such ideals as whiteness and female untouchability to technologies like electricity seems to be driven by the desire to transcend colonial histories of violence and extractivism. But it was colonial copper that made electricity possible in the first place in the 20th century. In Nkanga’s words, the imagining of the “shine” of whiteness in particular leads to the “obscurity” of colonial relations.
The connections established here with Nkanga, blast epistemological breaches into the notion of media technologies as shiny, immaterial, and ultimately white. In these, there must also be room for a very concrete question, namely: what do we actually owe?
While colonial raw materials remain obscured in church roofs and copperbased media infrastructures, there are far more obvious references in Berlin’s Mauerstrasse on the historic Deutsche Bank building. Deutsche Bank was one of the biggest financiers of the Otavi Mining and Railway Company, which had the railway built from Tsumeb to the port in Swakopmund to ship the mined copper. The railway not only represents the final dispossession of the Khoisan and Damara communities, but is also associated with the genocide of the Ovaherero people, as the railway was built through their land, which was one reason for their resistance.11 The building’s façade shows how white people imagined this scene: white figures hand over the railway and torch to the local population in a racist depiction. The self-elevation of whiteness and technology still serve to deny colonial violence today, as illustrated by the building’s only refurbishment just recently. Money is spent on the reconstruction of a 1908 façade, while demands for restitution from the descendants of victims of colonial crimes, in which today’s key stakeholders of the German economy have massively enriched themselves, are rejected.12
Goddess of Light, by Louis Schmidt, 1888.
NAOMIE GRAMLICH, is a research assistant in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Potsdam and is writing a doctorate on extractivism and (de)colonisation, taking the example of the copper mine in Tsumeb, Namibia. They has published numerous texts on the coloniality of raw materials and infrastructures, on the colonial history of botanical gardens, and on intersectional-feminist methods.
1 The work is accessible after simply logging in to the artist’s website https://www.otobong-nkanga.com 2 The “frontier” refers to a system of expansion that became the basis for capitalist growth from the 16th century onwards. To constantly extract new resources, geographical borders are rolled back, leaving ecological and social destruction behind. 3 Sam Nujoma, Copper. Geology and economic impact in Namibia, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, (Windhoek, 2009), p. 86. 4 Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant
Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 5 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value”, e-flux, no. 79 (Feb. 2017), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/ 6 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the
World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 7 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers”, Economic and Political Weekly, no. 38 (Nov.–Dec. 2003), pp. 5100–06, here p. 5100. 8 See Ferreira da Silva “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞”. 9 See also Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or
None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 10 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 76. 11 Naomie Gramlich, Mediengeologisches Sorgen. Mit Otobong Nkanga gegen Ökolonialität (“Media-geological concerns: With Otobong Nkanga against ecoloniality”), Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 13 (Jan. 2021), pp. 65–76. 12 Duncan Bartlett, “German bank accused of genocide”,
BBC News (25 Sept. 2001), news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1561463.stm
Esther Kinsky
The landscape seems so gentle here. Rolling hills, without sheer drops or steep rises, and yet the rash work of glacial shifts and tectonic movement long ago. The Eastern Alps and their foothills frame the view from east to west, at a distance. They’re mostly hazy-blue, in winter pink at sunrise, orange at sunset. Depending on the angle and sharpness of the light, I can make out the crags and lines of the rocky folds and they look harsh. To the south, across the flatland of fields and villages with tall, narrow, oddly minaret-like spires, lies the Adriatic Sea with its lagoons and estuaries, a luminous band on the edge of the horizon. On clear, crisp winter days and in the sudden glare of lightning during summer thunderstorms at night, the hotels and apartment buildings of the sparse seaside resorts stand out like tiny uneven teeth against the sky. My part, though, my “zona” as they call it here, is this pleasant in-between land, of fields and vineyards, small woods of beech, oak, chestnut on limestone outcrops, copses of hazel and hornbeam, clay pits, and peat bogs in secluded dips, clumps of elder. Postglacial is the word. Moraines. The backdrop to millennia of human migration, East to West, South to North, occasionally also in the opposite direction. Driven by need and greed, curiosity and despair.
Birds dwell here in multitudes. I don’t know much about birds but I’m learning. I can tell some songbirds apart by their tunes and voices, and I can identify the ones my cats lay at my feet, neat morning kills with a tiny hole in their chest matching the sharp tip of the feline tooth that has entered the ribcage. Mostly they’re redstarts, and whenever I cradle their lifeless bodies in my palm, I ask myself how it is possible that something so substantial in sound can weigh so little, as if it was the voice, now silenced, that had lent them weight.
I go for long walks every day. Walking and writing go together, I believe. Pace, rhythm, flow, the odd climb, and getting bogged down. I walk, I see, I name, and hear the reverberations of the names rippling into text.
Outside the village I see larger birds. Some scruffy bald ibises wandering back and forth in the middle of an untilled field. The jollier ones wander in pairs, the single ones appear deep in melancholy thought. Once I thought I heard an intermittent wail from a single one, quite far away, but I never heard the sound again. One autumn evening I encountered a flock of egrets alighting on a dark patch of land, a flutter of milk-white letters in the blue light before dusk, a foreign alphabet not to be deciphered, they didn’t stay long enough. They came on a brief inland mission from the nearest estuary or lagoon and soon flew back to lie low in their night. There’s an abundance of storks living near a waterlogged stretch of bogland. Along the small country road past the bogland, every taller pole, post, and crumbling chimney bears a stork’s nest. In August, the sky above the edge of the village is often teeming with young storks gliding through the air in silence. It looks like a rehearsal or a performance. The birds, circling high above the fields and gardens, seem very much taken with their own skill and ease. Maybe it’s a display of prowess, elegance, stamina, a ritual before their departure: who shall lead and who shall follow, and who shall be by my side. A handful of storks, however, stay behind, apparently unafraid of winter. Whenever I spot them, I count seven to the gaggle, a fairy-tale number. They roam the harvested fields for food, gleaming white in the winter sun, casting long wintry shadows.
I arrived here some years ago, a stranger to the land, to the zone. I walked and looked. I saw the abundance of stones that emerged from the soil after heavy rain. Over the years, peasants have laboriously gathered and stacked the stones on the corners of their fields, to form cone shaped heaps of broken rocks, solid little monuments to hardship and home to the reclusive pitch-black carbon snakes which emerge from underneath those uneven pyramid shelters in the early summer and proliferate.
Many fields are lined with trees. Thick, short, stocky tree trunks with a grey, grainy, bark, craggy as the alpine rockface in the distance. The bark looks rough but to the fingertips the surface, away from the crags and cracks, feels almost silky. Some trunks are cloaked in ivy. The treelines organise the land, divide it into uneven expanses, define the
views. It took me a while to identify the trees. I had first noticed them in late winter, when they were pruned to the bone and reminded me of the pollard willows of my childhood, on the misty damp flatland by the Lower Rhine. Like pollard willows, they stood wounded in the cold winter air, shorn of all branches, with the mutilated stump of a crown only distinguishable from the trunk by the circular yellow sores where the larger branches had been cut. But the early foliage in the spring, shiny, big green leaves pushing forth from the cracks and crevices in the clipped crown, had nothing in common with willows. Within a few spring days the trees have their crowns restored, dense, dark green, peculiarly shunned by birds. I learned that they are mulberry trees. In my second winter in the zona, I watched men prune the trees in December and January. Everything to do with the cutting of wood – from pruning trees to the splitting of kindling wood – is carried out when the moon is on the wane. If cut under the crescent moon, the wood will wail in the fire and bristle at the carpenter’s tools, it will be good for nothing, I hear.
The thin discarded mulberry branches have a reddish hue, reminiscent of reeds. Most of the tree-pruners use engine-powered saws whose howl rends the air during those wintry fortnights, followed by the dull thud of falling boughs. The thicker boughs and thinner branches are gathered in separate heaps, the boughs neatly bundled to be taken home as firewood. The wispy, thin branches are left lying between the trees, by the wayside, or they are taken to the site of the epiphany pyre on the tallest hill overlooking the village. The fire on the 6th of January is an important event. Will the smoke drift towards the sea or inland? If to the sea, the year will be harsh, and people will have to go away and find work abroad. If the smoke drifts inland, they can stay. It’s an old superstition but still very much on the onlookers’ minds. Emigration has marked the land as much as migration passing through. Poverty, misery, and need are written into the landscape in a language I had to learn. The peasants were landless until a century ago, working the fields of the gentry for a share of the crop. They owned their houses, with cowshed and close in the beehivish villages, but nothing outside – with the exception of the mulberry trees which marked the boundaries between the fields and hosted silkworm cultures to keep the families in bread, with little butter. Silk-spinning grew into an industry, and women and children walked the five or six miles to the silk mill by the banks of the vast unregulated gravel bed of the Tagliamento river. The silk mill is now partly cloaked in ivy, like the trunks of mulberry trees between untended fields, but it is still beautiful, with its tall cathedral windows, a disused temple of broken glass, once home to the first labour union in Italy.
It is winter now. For the first time I’ve seen the land under a blanket of snow. The snow shifted the proportions of dark and light, and the mulberry lines spelt out something stark and new to me.
The trees are almost all shorn now, the epiphany fire’s burnt down, and I didn’t see where the wind blew the smoke. African migrants roam deserted village streets and peddle brooms and underwear. I hear red robins, coal tits, green woodpeckers – the days are getting longer. The blackbird’s still rasping on the lookout for the odd rotten apple, to cure its throat of winter. A week or two and it will sing at dusk. I walk and walk and read the treelines, again and again.
ESTHER KINSKY, poet, prose author, and translator, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Literature Section, since the end of 2021. In 2020 she received the German Prize for Nature Writing.
An exchange of ideas on the relationship between ecology, society, and art by Carola Bauckholt, Julia Gerlach, and Iris ter Schiphorst
The global threat posed by the climate and environmental crisis worries many music-creators so fundamentally that they are questioning their actions and looking for ways to express their testimonies in music, sounds, and collective projects. In order to exchange ideas about new approaches and to discuss the role of art, the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste is organising an open space conference on 7 and 8 October 2022 together with European partners. A festival is planned for the end of August 2023, bringing together local and global perspectives in sound art, electroacoustic and instrumental composition, and participatory formats. The guiding principles are being touched by sound, experiencing environmental changes through music and, crucially, making it possible to encounter these through one’s own hearing and listening, doing and participating.
JULIA GERLACH What do the issues of climate, environment, and sustainability mean in our art form, in music – aesthetically, socially, and economically? Do they affect composing, and should music be political and communicate messages?
CAROLA BAUCKHOLT We’re in a situation where the survival of humanity, that is, the future of our descendants, is at stake. It’s long been known that our system of growth is suicidal in its use of resources. But now, we’re also experiencing it. Things are happening that we couldn’t have imagined: that borders within Europe would close because of a pandemic, that cultural events would no longer take place, and that Russian troops would invade Ukraine, as they did on 24 February. For many in our section, the fundamental question is how we should act as artists in these crises. Do I have to become more explicit? Does my music have a more specific task?
IRIS TER SCHIPHORST At the moment, I find it difficult to write or think about “sustainability”, as this war is shifting priorities. In Europe, we’re facing a totally new political reality that we’re forced to acknowledge and in which nothing less than the face of a cruel power is revealed, embodied by Putin, a brutal imperialist who has obviously been preparing his superpower plans for a long time and now sees the historic moment to implement them – and will stop at nothing in doing so. At the same time, another part of The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just been published and, as usual (as one is now sadly tempted to say), warns of the dangerous and farreaching destruction of nature and its consequences. Consequences that – and this is where this report differs from all previous ones – will impact Europe particularly severely in the near future. The continent is facing extreme challenges in every respect, which will affect all its citizens. I can only hope that we overcome these challenges and, as the Ukrainians are currently doing in exemplary fashion, commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the value of democracy.
ITS We know that so-called “climate change” or, better, that the dramatic increase in global warming – with all its catastrophic consequences – is caused by humans. Nevertheless, not all people are equally responsible. And the effects don’t impact everyone equally either, which is why I find the word “we” in these discussions highly problematic. It not only obscures the fact that there are profiteers of the degradation of the environment who should be held accountable and that those who benefit most from global capitalism are best able to evade the consequences of environmental degradation, but also that those worst hit by these consequences are those who are least to blame. After all, in the name of the United Nations, this pinnacle of creation has agreed to the socalled 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are to be implemented by the year 2030. First and foremost, poverty and hunger are to be ended, quality education occupies fourth place, of course gender equality is also mentioned, and it extends right through to specific environmental measures based on the three pillars of ecology, the economy, and social welfare – too good to be true? And all this will supposedly be done whilst maintaining economic growth and full productive employment, in other words, whilst maintaining the system that is responsible for the current predicament. Sociologist Klaus Dörr advises us to wait and see. Let us see whether this system can dig us out of the hole. The experience so far, however, tells a different story; the gulf between the articulated goals and those realised has tended to widen rather than shrink over the years. In the meantime, it is important to continue working on all levels, artistically and politically, to keep a firm eye on the sustainability goals and, if necessary, to apply grassroots pressure when it becomes obvious that they’re not being met.
Luca Lombardi JG Transformation of our society in all its fragmentation is a highly ambitious goal. Conferences of cultural practitioners on sustainability are always about this fundamental transformation and the contribution that culture and cultural institutions can play, especially when it comes to structures and attitudes. We’re a large institution borne by artists. Where do we take our cue? Within the institution itself? In the field of commissions and grants? In art and music?
CB We’re the nerve ends of society. We draw attention to things, but the question is how explicitly we do it. I remember playing a piece by Gerhard Rühm when I was a teenager. This was around 1987, and it was called Kleine Geschichte der Zivilisation (“Little history of civilisation”). Peaceful, whole-tone chords on the piano, and on tape we hear car noise, at first sporadically but increasing in scale and culminating in a huge collapse – followed by a continuation of the peaceful piano chords. That’s a quite graphic representation of the situation, isn’t it? I also grew up with Mauricio Kagel’s opera Die Erschöpfung der Welt (“The exhaustion of the world”). I still remember the first line: “God created man and then abolished him.” Or his piece Mare Nostrum, which addressed the trashing of the Mediterranean back in 1978. The threat to our habitat from our homemade poison was very, very present at that time, but we somehow got distracted later. The awareness was there; we failed to act.
Christina Kubisch, RHEINKLÄNGE (fluid landscapes), 2013/14.
JG Yes, it’s distressing. The knowledge and awareness were there in the 1970s and ’80s, mirrored and highlighted in music: in works by Rühm, Kagel, and by Luc Ferrari who quotes extensively from texts by scientists in his audio spectacle Allo! Ici la terre (“Hello! This is earth”) from 1974. Now we’re wrestling with strategies for action and, while doing so, wondering if they can still have sufficient impact. What necessity do you see in art?
CB It is neither about the greenwashing of art nor about imposing conditions on art. Just as we should treat living beings, the air, and water as equals, we should also treat our art in the same way. Not imposing our limited minds on it but giving it space to live. By this I mean the creative process, because sounds and materials are often more intelligent than we are. Following them, playing with them, is what I call composing.
ITS Yes, of course, our minds are limited, but I think we need them today more than ever, as the events around us show. That is why, as a composer, I’m always interested in approaches that contribute to “self-empowerment” with artistic means. This is also true of my piece Konzepte zu Flächen(n) für Chöre und andere Gruppen (“Concepts on surface(s) for choirs and other groups”): in this piece, Fläche (surface) is treated as an impervious surface, converted into an “ecological footprint”, or as the maximum size of refugee accommodation decreed by the authorities, or even as the surface that we as Europeans literally occupy most of the day, namely the chair. However, reference is also made to Klang-Flächen (sound surfaces), with the inclusion of György Ligeti’s music. It is a performative piece with an open form, whose content is developed by the performers themselves in a prolonged process according to a “list game” I designed. The results I’ve seen so far have been totally astonishing and very exciting.
JG It’s an exciting approach that also strives for a process of transformation through the self-empowerment of the performers. In the context of the Akademie der Künste, the question naturally arises as to how an institution can be transformed – as a mirror of society, with all its interlocking structures. If we expect the transformation of the whole of society, then this can only happen if institutions are also transformed, if our activities, concerts, and events take on a different shape and change. But there are still a lot of question marks about how to take concrete action, how to initiate a participatory process so that we don’t suddenly realise, as we did in the ’80s, that scientists have said it all and artists have spelled it out in their works, but there was no action.
ITS Yes, it won’t work without the transformation of institutions. Courses of action, guidelines, and pilot projects already exist. This is where the Academy should join in. Furthermore, political efficacy should be achieved through an interplay of bottom-up and top-down. The overriding goals are set at the top (depending on the party/government or institutional management), and these are then elaborated at the bottom in detail to yield results that take effect bottom-up again. However, top and bottom often clash; pressure from below is necessary to get those at the top to move on a little more. So, for example, sustainability might be proclaimed from the top of the cultural sector whilst obviously meaning nothing but austerity measures and austerity economics, and then it is up to cultural practitioners themselves to oppose this one-sidedness – and, if necessary, to vehemently push for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, almost all of which can also be applied to the cultural sector.
Personally, I’d like us composers and artists to get together more, also and specially to talk about the issues of content and aesthetics in the context of “sustainability” – and even to argue about them if need be. Contemporary music is more diverse than ever, but each small group, each circle of composers and musicians, moves mainly in its own bubble. That’s why I think we need much more discussion among ourselves, because we also need to question our routines, even our artistic ones. We must examine our personal convictions and so on.
CB You mention artistic diversity. As well as productions addressing and uncovering ecological issues – particularly in sound art and landscape composition as well as in field recordings – several ways of making production itself more sustainable have evolved. I’d like to mention a project here that I was particularly impressed by. Back in 1990, Daniel Ott initiated the Rümlingen Festival. Ado Müller, a clergyman in a small village near Basel, placed his church at the festival’s disposal. From this starting point, the festival ventured out into the countryside. For example, the subject of “twilight” was chosen one year, and the sunset and sunrise were composed on a hill in the Basel area. That seemed a daft idea to me at the time. Who’d come to a sunrise out in the country at four o’clock in the morning? But Daniel Ott unflinchingly stuck to his guns and approached composers who had contributed to the project. To my surprise, the place was packed, with busloads of people coming from Basel and hiking up to witness the sunrise in different sound situations – Manos Tsangaris with Markus Stockhausen up a tree and me lying on resonating hay bales. Or the project stromaufwärts (“Upstream”), in which an unexpectedly large audience wandered “upstream” in the dark for an entire night, past various sound stations most of which, because of the darkness, were audible only – until they reached the bed scenario in a clearing in the moonlight.
JG For me, my own listening position was important. The key experience was that you walk through an area and climb a hill, there is a certain amount of effort involved, that between the reception of the pieces composed especially for the festival, you also perceive all the other moments of sound and silence. Since the hike lasted over six hours, it was also simply a time of substance, rich in experience.
CB This physical effort results in a very unusual timescale and lively participation. The Rümlingen Festival has also always had a very strong social and ecological outlook. Daniel Ott involved residents and local music groups, and other people as well as helpers and caterers. It’s not just about a single composition, but about the idea of exploring an area and making it an acoustic experience: place, habitat, and population.
JG That sounds like a kind of alternative to international premiere events like the Donaueschingen Festival, in that it includes lively local participation and occurs outdoors and thus without a lot of technical input; and it’s accessible by public transport, avoiding the multitudes of international participants jetting in. But can we get along without contact with the rest of the world? Isn’t it crucial precisely for this “great” transformation to forge trans-hemispheric communities and engage in in-depth dialogue, also with a view to climate justice and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals? Don’t we urgently need to step out of our bubbles and tackle the massive problems in other parts of the world?
CB This is important and a major conflict in our work. The technology has become more compact and more powerful, but many more people are using it. It does have its benefits – we use much less paper, for example. I try to work against our frenetic pace and stay with one thing, to permit greater concentration and depth.
In a global context, however, there is another factor of great concern, namely the impoverishment of biodiversity. We go outside and have forgotten the sound of insects. What does the buzzing of insects mean? Today, I occasionally hear the buzzing of bumblebees, and I’m glad I do. Which is a striking difference to my childhood experiences. I still remember having to clean car windows covered with dead insects. And today? Murray Schaffer started the World Soundscape Project in Canada back in 1971, which records, investigates, and documents soundscapes worldwide. Most of the documented habitats no longer exist at all. Mass extinction is advancing exponentially, right through to complete breakdown.
The other day, I got to know David Monacchi, who founded the organisation Fragments of Extinction in Italy. I was able to hear an eight-channel version of his film Dusk Chorus. He made recordings In the Amazon basin, where biodiversity is at its highest, and wishes to pass on this experience. It was an eye-opener for me – this spectrum of sound from the lowest to the highest frequencies in a tremendous concentration and volume. I experienced the realisation of how organisms work together, that they also hear each other. Each creature only has a chance of survival if it finds a vacant slot in the overall frequency band. Otherwise, they must go somewhere else where they can be heard. Hearing this multitude of voices and huge range of trebles and basses touched me deeply in view of the wasteland we’ve created here with concrete and our comfortable lives. We simply don’t recognise the loss we’ve incurred.
JG Intact, biodiverse ecosystems are also acoustically rich, so you can hear when systems break down. In the summer, I took part in an interesting “sound walk” at the Klang Moor Schopfe (Sound moor sheds) music festival in Appenzell with the Swiss artist Markus Mäder, who has cooperated with scientists to develop a special microphone that records biodiversity in soils – life and activity – acoustically, making it audible. Drained moors and dead soils, soils degraded by impervious surfaces or environmental damage, are practically soundless, and one hears little or nothing. Living, intact soils produce a rich world of sound. This method can also be used, however, to determine how regions are recovering. Mäder also uses another microphone that he inserts into trees
Christina Kubisch
Two-part sound installation on the banks of the Rhine (October 2013–December 2014)
Christina Kubisch, RHEINKLÄNGE (fluid landscapes), 2013/14.
The Rhine is not just a river. It is a mythological place, a setting in the Romantic period, a site of recreation, an embattled border during two world wars. It is also a waterway, a floodplain, and a drainage channel for industry. But what does the river sound like? What do you hear on the Rhine? In the Rhine literature of the Romantic period, there is much written about people singing on boats (the famous Rheinische Liedertafel is an example of this), of the sounds of ferries and barges, of the waves splashing on the shore, and so on. But in most cases, the literary descriptions remain “silent”; the eye apparently sufficed to achieve a certain degree of general rapture, and one can assume that contemplation at a certain time was not yet disturbed by loud and obtrusive noise.
The discrepancy between what can be seen and what can be heard on the Rhine was the starting point for my work Rheinklänge (fluid landscapes). It’s about listening on, above, and below the water. What can be heard and what can be seen at the same time? Do the sights match the sounds and vice versa?
Over a period of several weeks, I tapped into and recorded the Rhine from its banks, on its bridges, above and below the water. There are sounds that can be experienced without devices as well as sounds that can only be heard with the aid of special microphones/hydrophones and pick-ups.
Of particular interest to me were the sounds that are not immediately perceptible – those that are largely inaudible but can be made audible. These include transmissions from underwater microphones (hydrophones), which make it possible to hear the motion of ships totally differently to how they sound above the surface. Above the water, the ships produce almost uniform and not very characteristic rhythmic sounds and timbres, but underwater they have an astonishing dynamic of their own. Sound transmits and propagates differently in water than it does in air. You can hear the various engine noises long before you see the ships, and the frequency range extends down to the lowest pitches. The sounds of modern container ships, for example, are as powerful and noisy underwater as vehicles on a motorway.
In the installation, “contemporary” intersecting sounds of the Rhine from below and above ground are audible on both banks of the river, spatially connected by the so-called Südbrücke (Konrad Adenauer bridge). A second bridge is created by the sounds themselves that wander from one bank to the other, popping up again and again on one bank or the other as if they had taken flight or swum through water. As a unifying element, these sounds of instrumental or electronic origin are joined by the amplified real sounds of the Rhine. These are transient events that seem to come from the ether or the water, intangible and unidentifiable, like an indirect response to the real noise of shipping on the Rhine.
CHRISTINA KUBISCH, installation and sound artist, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Music Section, since 2013.
Peter Ablinger
Tree-planting in 2008.
A piece from the “Weiss/Weisslich” series, consisting of tree sounds, dates to the mid-1990s. The sounds of eighteen different trees were recorded and sound-edited in immediate succession, so that the differences in their respective timbres of rustling stand out clearly. At the same time, I conceived the piece “Weiss/Weisslich 26, Skizzen für ein Arboretum” (“White/whitish 26, sketches for an arboretum”), the plan being to plant trees based on acoustic considerations. Since I did not expect to be given an immediate opportunity to implement such a project, initially the piece consisted of an ever-expand-ing notebook of observations in the field and various ideas for tree plantings in special arrangements. Approximately twelve years after the first sketch, the first arboretum was planted in Ulrichsberg, Austria, in April 2008. But of course, this was just another step on the way to the actual arboretum; because the trees are still so young, they do not yet offer enough resistance to the wind (which is supposed to “always” blow at the chosen spot) to sound properly. The trees must first mature, and so the piece will only come to fruition in thirty to forty years. That makes this project a particularly sustainable one!
(From: “Vom Gesamtkunstwerk zum Gesamtwerk, Gespräch mit Andreas Fellinger” (“From the total work of art to the total work, conversation with Andreas Fellinger”), slightly modified; originally published in: freiStil, Magazin für Musik und Umgebung, 2008.)
PETER ABLINGER, composer and sound artist, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Music Section, since 2012.
ITS Besides the loss you mention, there is something else that crosses my mind. Shouldn’t we make it possible to have this multiplicity of voices in human society? Don’t we need a better, more socially just order in which truly every voice is heard? History teaches us that this must be fought for.
“We’ve lost respect for nature and empathy with the many other living beings and only felt for ourselves. Trees, birds, and wasps are now dying. And it is getting warmer and warmer in our greenhouse. But – and this we must not forget – we had the best of intentions. We industrialised to end human hunger and promote prosperity. That has somehow gone wrong. In doing so we’ve awakened the truly great hunger.”
Walter Zimmermann
ITS The great hunger continues. It is repeatedly about the “land grabs” that neoliberalism is encouraging, must encourage, because it constantly needs to identify new markets in order to “grow”, in order to be able to “keep the ball rolling” (although we know that this model has actually long become obsolete). This “hunger” tends to stop at nothing. Not at water, not at DNA, not at care, not at the mineral resources in the remotest nature reserve. The philosopher Eva von Redecker describes our peculiar concept of property ownership: a forest may be cut down if the owners so decide, even if it is ecologically or economically absurd. For her, it is above all this form of ownership that is accelerating the degradation of nature.
CB: Art is called upon to make this problem audible and perceptible. Surprisingly, we’re only moved emotionally either when we’re up to our necks in water, as was literally the case recently in the Ahr valley, or when something appeals strongly to our emotions. I find it very interesting that there is even a term for it, solastalgia. Solastalgia refers to the sense of loss and emotional anguish we feel when distressing environmental changes unfold before our eyes. The term was coined in 2005 by Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia. It’s no longer a matter of scientific fact, but rather of our survival. We all know the difference between intellectual insight and the emotional response of when we feel deeply and react with anger and sadness – which is when we can change our behaviour. In the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, we’ve been specifically addressing this issue for some time now, and the more deeply we think about it, the more radically and catastrophically we also question our work. In this respect, there is a real sense of urgency in dealing with it. ITS Andreas Malm has pointed out that, in our process of global warming, the temporal connections extend centuries into the past and into the future. Today’s temperatures in the Middle East are thus the consequence of combustion processes that took place at other times and in other places. Can we as composers, who are also specialists in time (our art unfolds in time), perhaps use our skills to make these temporal dimensions and causalities audible? My work is repeatedly concerned with the interaction of disparate material from different times and contexts and about the question of which interrelationships arise audibly…
CB Solastalgia, by the way, is the title of a piece that is currently being produced in collaboration with violinist Karin Hellqvist in the Academy’s Electronic Studio. Last year, we sent various sounds of ice – melting ice, the rubbing of the ice floes, what it sounds like when water and air interact under a thin sheet of ice – back and forth to each other, and Karin imitated these sounds on the violin. Many recordings focused on just one aspect, so we had a lot of individual tracks to put together. We crawled tonally into the element of ice and let it speak through our ears.
JG Interesting that you bring up the example of ice. The melting of the ice caps is one of many environmental changes that we don’t directly experience, and temporalspatial distance is a problem when it comes to emotional responses. Many regions of the world are already much more seriously and existentially affected by climate change than we are, so we cannot exclude global contexts. We need to think about them even if we do not experience them directly. Music can generate awareness of these global contexts. Christina Kubisch’s work aims to make the inaudible audible – electromagnetic voltages such as those emitted by our computers, or the huge volume of underwater noise caused by shipping on the Rhine.
CB There are a lot of cooperative ventures between science and music, because our ear, the artistic ear, perceives things differently than the scientific ear. This is already reflected in the development of the various microphone systems. Microphones are, after all, the extension of our auditory capacity, and they also influence the end recordings. The same goes for the tools of analysis. In this respect, there is a need for our ears.
“RÜMLINGEN LANDSCAPE OPERAS applied / transposed to the city. For example, pieces composed for a stream or river of the rural idyll of Rümlingen are applied to the river or stream of 6-lane traffic on ‘17. Juni’. – In the sense of: THIS is nature too! WE are also nature. Consequently, nature has no opposite. Nature is nonsense. In the sense of: Simply using the term ‘nature’ is a distraction from the real problems. ‘No people, no problems’ (Stalin).”
Peter Ablinger
CAROLA BAUCKHOLT, composer, publisher, intermedia artist, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Music Section, since 2013 and Director of the section since 2021.
IRIS TER SCHIPHORST, composer, performer, and author, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Music Section, since 2013 and Deputy Director of the section since 2021.
JULIA GERLACH is Secretary of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste.
CRISIS, DEPRESSION, OCCULTISM, AND COMPOSING IN THE END TIMES! THE NORWEGIAN OPRA! THE FOLLOWERS OF “Ø”! TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF APOCALYPTIC EXISTENTIALISM!
Trond Reinholdtsen
Composing was always a kind of panic act for me (the deadline, the lack of ideas, the collaborators …), and maybe I am predisposed to a pessimistic and alarmistic world view. Can I hope that this gives me a kind of aesthetic competence in facing the ecological, social, and digital catastrophes of our time? How can we save the Art from politics?
“Crisis” – from Greek krisis, “Decision”, from krinein “to decide”.
In 2012, I wrote (one of) my (many) crisis piece(s) “Musik”, and the crisis in question here, of course, was the wellknown “crisis of music”. The dramaturgy of the piece included a catalogue of different futile attempts to revitalise contemporary music and the concert situation. It built up to a dramatised krisis, a moment of scission and decision: a big NO to the whole situation of the concert, the standardised relation between composer and musician, the production apparatus of the new music festival, the bureaucratisation and academisation of new music. Instead, a new genre was formed: “opra” – an own-institution, grounded in my own opra house “The Norwegian Opra” – where (maybe) a utopian idea of pure artistic freedom was to be realised. The initial strategy to achieve this was to do everything myself (composing, directing, building, performing, selling tickets, and being the only one in the audience).
Ten years later, the institution has built a small imperium in the forest in Sweden consisting of two opra houses, an opra barn and an opra meadow, as well as a dedicated crew of Opra-Superstars. The opra film series “Ø” now consists of seventeen episodes where we follow three protagonists’ withdrawal from the world – from “the Outside”, from “the System”, from the rising sea levels – to prepare in contemplation and concentration for the socalled world changing “Event”. A spin-off to “Ø” has been launched: “The Followers of Ø”: “The Followers of Ø” have seen all episodes of the opera series “Ø”, maybe on the Internet. The Followers are idealised audience-precariat-proletariat-interpreters, who have taken it upon themselves to transform the message of “Ø” into praxis in the world, and “to act so that there is no longer any distinction between Life and Idea”.
I guess the “Followers of Ø” is also a fantasy about utopian universalism: these figures quasi-represent ALL outcasts – the weak, the stupid, the old, and the lonely. They are building the ever-expanding off-grid-PrepperOperndorf on the meadow in Sweden and have recently constructed a fully functional Outdoor-Air-ConditionedGeoengineering-Weather-Machine, a Waldbrand-Erlöscher-Apparat (Forest-Fire-Extinguishing-apparatus), a Rainwater-Filtrator, a massive Popcorn-hoarding-storage, and, not least, a private Cinema-Pantheon where the complete Ø-films are shown non-stop (because it is easier to imagine the End of the World, than the End of Music History).
TROND REINHOLDTSEN, composer, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Music Section, since 2021.
Follower: “Wir arme Leut!” (“We poor people!”) (Still from “The Followers of Ø, part .1”).
Followers: “Ø will be with you until the End of the World” (Still from “The Followers of Ø, part 1”).
