CHANGE THINGS
"If you believe in the transformative power of art practices..." The words stood out in bold yellow capitals as I scrolled down my newsfeed in the train to the Obwald mountains in central Switzerland. I had decided to get away for a while to gather my thoughts, and this unexpected interruption chimed strangely with the ideas I already had in mind. Taking Pauline Oliveros's 2005 Deep Listening. A Composer’s Sound Practice as my guide, I set out on my journey. And putting my own highly individual interpretation on it, I sought to call on my whole being to listen actively. Would I be "able to target a sound or a sequence of sounds as a form within space/time continuum and to perceive the detail or trajectory of the sound or sequence of sounds"?[1]
In 1988, the composer, performer, accordionist and listener Pauline Oliveros recorded a performance in a vast underground cistern on the Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle, and named it Deep Listening (New Albion Records, 1989). The title was first and foremost a reference to the location of the recording, four metres below ground in a tank sixty metres in diameter, with a forty-five second reverberation time, limited oxygen, and other unique acoustic features. Deep Listening became a guide, the term incorporating all Pauline Oliveros's experiments in sound and sonics since the 1950s. It laid the foundations for her idiosyncratic approach to listening, sound production, meditation, and healing, with a view to fostering "creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and non-musicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages".[2]
Do we respect nature?
Change everything,
Change beautiful things,
Change anything,
Change things[3]
Like a well-established mantra, the words of her 1993 Poem of Change accompanied me into a deep-set valley, merging with the sounds of the rushing waters in the stream below, the sight of traces of condensation and a salamander scuttling for its life from a predator. Focal, global. Its tail will grow back in a few weeks, I thought. Human bodies may not be able to grow new limbs, or generate a whole new body from a handful of stem cells like a hydra, but they certainly undergo mutation. Millions of skin cells are replaced every day, creating a whole new layer every three months, while our stomach lining is replaced every week and our bone tissue every ten years.
Though our corporeality sometimes weighs us down, and despite scarring and the inevitability of decay, our bodies are constantly regenerating. They are malleable and transforming. But they are also transformable and open to formatting. The body is a living entity in the sense put forward by Paul B. Preciado: "It is a living political archive manufactured not only by the patriarchy or by medicine, but also by artistic and audiovisual depictions, institutions, and the market... sex, gender, sexuality, race, health, handicap: the condition of your living body is politically defined by these categories".[4]And these categories belong to the technologies of power that we must critique to spark a process of bodily, individual and societal transformation and to implement strategies of resistance. As I walked, I became increasingly aware of this shift. Could I hear the sound of my own cells multiplying? The trail, the ironically named Ort der Stille (place of silence), suddenly became agreeably sound-filled. Had my free-ranging adaptation doomed the implementation to failure, or should I accept the noise as a rather satisfying outcome?
Is sexism real?
Change the same thing,
Change the same thing,
Change the other thing.
Asking why we haven't put a poet on the moon yet, Pauline Oliveros gave her own clever answer in 1987 in Echoes from the Moon, creating a sophisticated EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) radio transmission system with the help of an amateur radio operator. It joined her many other inventions, including the Extended Instrument System (EIS), a complex set of algorithms processing digital signals for performances. Pauline Oliveros and the radio operator built a network of twenty-four large Yagi-Uda beam antennas that could send and receive radio signals, letting users broadcast their voice on the surface of the moon and hear its "echo" 2.5 seconds later. [5]
I reached the valley bottom and climbed the facing slope. Pauline Oliveros went to the moon and back, she went underground and returned to the surface, from the inner core of the earth to galactic matter. Her trajectories reached beyond those of the customary territories of action, listening, and creating music. She was able to push back the limits of conventional thought and sound creation to put forward pioneering radical feminist thought in a field strongly dominated by patriarchal, hierarchical structures that encouraged competitiveness. What needed to be "tuned" above all was human beings, individuals, to seek out new itineraries, new perspectives, to build new visions and soundscapes, to expand in a way that shows how “one is connected to the whole environment and beyond".[6]
Are children loved?
Change the same thing
Change foolish things […]
Change nothing
Change something
Walk as silently as possible, as she said. Might my feet be turning into ears, attuned to the chemical signals of the mycorrhizal network growing underground, communicating and generating fresh soil? The network of connections and interactions between roots and fungi is a "jungle of threads, synapses and nodes [...] [that] has similarities with our own human brains",[7] studied by the scientist Suzanne Simard since the 1990s. It connects trees with other organisms, transmits information and transports nutriments like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus between plants, improving their resistance and capacity for adaptation, survival, and reproduction. If we were able to listen to soil substrata, would we be in a better position to comprehend the state of the planet and face the threat to our environment? The notion of understanding the ensemble of symbiotic inter-species relationships has made some progress, encouraging us to think of the plant realm as a collaborative, interdependent, polyphonic entity, helping "undermine the dogma of individualism and temper the view of competition as the primary engine of evolution".[8]
As I walked, I felt close to this site of collective experience, this other site of transition. Transforming and transformable. Before offering new perspectives, it is therefore the mapping of our earth in transition and its shifting power structures that we would need. We also need to prioritise discussions of the "technologies of power already at play, call into question the political and legal architecture of patriarchal colonialism [...] the differences between the sexes and [...] hierarchies of race, family, and the nation state".[9]
Is racism real?
Change slow thing
Change few things
Change another thing
Change two things
Change rare things
Change one thing
Jardin d'Hiver #2: Poems of Change could well be a garden. A garden, but not exactly a nineteenth-century winter garden, designed to allow non-native seeds to survive in a hostile climate, steered by a botanical obsession with naming – or indeed renaming – everything, categorising and classifying it all as an act of ownership and creating the illusion of control over the other and the elsewhere. Sites established for bourgeois enjoyment and to promote and lay claim to the wealth of the colonies, on the lines of museums. Sites that are now heir to colonial and patriarchal violence, bearing "histories of war and disruption, memory and amnesia, blurred lines, appropriation and expropriation".[10] This is a new vision of gardenhood, in which each individual is enabled to flourish in a network of care with its own specificities while tying associative, connective webs to build a community of meaning defined by its multiplicity of points of view.
Exactly thirty years ago, Pauline Oliveros's Poem of Change asked questions that remain of burning significance today. Alongside her battles now stand today's concerns, including those raised by Paul B. Preciado: “what can we learn from our shared history? Can a new form of masculinity be defined in non-necropolitical terms? Is it possible to depatriarchalize and decolonize the institutions of family and nation-state? Is there an equitable way to govern the use of reproductive fluids (semen, milk, blood), organs (uterus), cells (ovules, spermatozoids), and genetic materials? Is it possible to redistribute them, or even to collectivize them?"[11] The exhibition is this new garden, a contact zone, displaying the diversity of the local art scene with bold proposals showcasing their individual capacity to forge connections, raise suggestions – to unsettle – in perpetually mobile characters that sometimes elude our grasp but also in the meaning they build together. This multitude takes over the museum, instilling a healthy sense of doubt in our established patterns of thought, jostling our certainties and triggering controversy from the inside out. Jardin d'Hiver #2: Poems of Change is less a command to change than an invitation to the individual and collective introspection needed to define new paths.
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[1] Pauline Oliveros,
Deep Listening. A Composer’s Sound Practice, New York, Lincoln, Shanghai: iUniverse, 2005, p. xxiii .
[2] Statement by the Deep Listening Institute, quoted by Jacob Slattery, “Bye bye @OliveP: Remembering the legacy of Pauline Oliveros”, 2017: https://bachtrack.com/fr_FR/article-pauline-oliveros-legacy-january-2017
[3] Pauline Oliveros, Poem of Change, 10min. 28, produced for West German radio in Cologne in 1993. The following extracts are from the same poem, transcribed by Simon Würsten Marin.
[4] Paul B. Preciado interviewed by Céline Daumas, “Nos corps trans sont un acte de dissidence du système sexe-genre”, Libération, 19 March 2019.
[5] Douglas Barrett, “Echoes”, in E-flux, 2021: https://yctm.e-flux.com/interplanetarymachines
[6] Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening. A Composer's Sound Practice, op. cit., p. xxiii
[7] Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the wisdom of the forest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021, p. 3.
[8] Ferris Jabr, “The Social Life of Forests”, in The New York Times Magazine, 2 December 2020.
[9] Paul B. Preciado, “Nos corps trans sont un acte de dissidence du système sexe-genre”, op. cit.
[10] Bénédicte Savoy, Objets du désir, désirs d’objets, inaugural conference, Collège de France, Paris: Fayard, 2017, p. 32.
[11] Paul B. Preciado, “Baroque Technopatriarchy: Reproduction”, in Artforum, vol. 56, no. 5, January 2018.