Michelle Atherton’s ‘Low Lying & Soil Séance Sessions V’ Opens 6th March 2025
Credit: Michelle Atherton Soil Séance Sessions V 2025 Album Cover
Low Lying & Soil Séance Sessions V
Museum für Sepulkralkultur
Opening 19:00 Thursday 6 March 2025
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 2025.
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.
A very warm thank you to all the people who generously participated in Kassel listening sessions and to Hauptfriedhof, Westfriedhof, Künstler-Nekropole and FriedWald for agreeing to be involved with the project.
Thank you also to Edward Simpson & Tom Fisher/Action Pyramid; and Dub Studios, Bristol; RAD Printing, Kent; ADMRC & SCII, Sheffield Hallam University and the Museum für Sepulkralkultur.
References:
Kristina M. Lyons Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners + Life Politics Duke University Press 2020
George Monbiot Regenesis Alan Lane, Pengiun Random House 2022 p23
Elvia Wilk Death By Landscape: Essay Soft Skull 2022
Visit the exhibition at:
Museum für Sepulkralkultur Weinbergstraße 25-27 34117 Kassel, Germany
Telefon: 0561 / 918 93 15
Tues 10.00 – 17.00 | Wed 10.00 – 20.00 | Thur-Sun 10.00 – 17.00 | Mon closed
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