Acoustic fossil: listening to climate change.

Santiago Reyes Villaveces / Daniel Villegas Velez (Colombia)

What is -or can be- the role of listening in the academy and artistic creation in the task of understanding, conceptualizing and acting in a meaningful way in the face of the global transformations that are grouped under the terms of climate crisis or change, global warming, anthropocene and/or capitalocene? To address this question, our discussion takes as a starting point the sound installation Fósil acústico (vestibular organ), winner of the Túnel de Escape grant (Ministry of Culture, 2022).

The installation transforms the exhibition site located within the walls of Cartagena into a resonance chamber -an immersive sound environment- assimilating the space inside the human ear to propose a reflection on listening and resonance as a means to rethink our relationship with our surroundings and the environment.

With the help of authors such as Christina Sharpe, Kathryn Yusoff and Dipesh Chakrabarty among others, we will explore how and to what extent the conceptual vocabulary of the sound field (resonance, vibration, oscillation, frequency, timbre, affect, etc.) allow us to understand phenomena that, due to their global dimensions and millenary temporalities, escape human understanding, approaching them from a perspective located in the Global South as a critical place to question the coloniality/anthropocene/capitalocene relationship.

With the support of the Colombo American Center