What is it like, a spring without voices? Without the song, beauty and colors of thrushes, jays, wrens and other birds that are dead or otherwise gone. Sixty years ago, that was exactly what was happening in many areas of the United States. The reason? The massive use of the insecticide DDT, which was soon banned thanks to “Silent Spring”. That was the name of the book by the biologist Rachel Carson, published in 1962, which is now regarded as the cornerstone of the global eco-movement. A life without the singing of birds seemed to people a terrible vision. One that is unfortunately not out of the world. Birds and other animal species are still dying out every day.
That means: Our world is becoming acoustically poorer every day, and we often don’t even notice it. Because we lack the interest or the aesthetic awareness for it. That’s exactly what I want Kalas Liebfried change with “Fragments Of Sonic Extinction”. one under www.sonicextinction.net localized website project that the Munich artist started a few months ago. He has asked international artists, composers, musicians and electronics producers to submit audiovisual works that deal with the extinction of natural sounds. The first edition, which has been completely online since July 29, comprises a total of eight contributions uploaded week after week. A second edition is to follow in the first quarter of next year.
Orca whales can be heard singing
In any case, you can now hear orca whales singing in the contribution by Alba Vega Mulet from Amsterdam and also see them swimming via a linked live camera. Toronto’s Laura M. Ramsey is studying the phenomenon of high temperatures silencing locusts. New Yorker Alexander Liebermann has translated the song of the Hawaiian archipelago’s native and most likely extinct bird Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō (scale-throated moho) into a composition that you can listen to and download. Lea Bertucci, also from New York, is dedicated to the American passenger pigeon, which was exterminated in the 19th century, in the form of drawings and speculative sounds. And in his contribution, the composer Nursalim Yadi Anugerah brings together texts by Jorge Louis Borges and Bernard Sellato with ideas that the people of Kalimantan (Borneo) have of tigers.
The Munich artist Kalas Liebfried listens carefully.
(Photo: Jonas Hoeschl)
Kalas Liebfried himself contributed texts, images and sounds to a performance that he completed together with the clarinettist Rozenn le Trionnaire in March at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and which has the capercaillie as its theme. The audience there received ceramic pipes and playing instructions. You can also interact in many places on the website with the mouse or in other ways. That was very important to the 33-year-old: that you feel “responsible”. And that as a visitor you gain an aesthetic and thus emotional access to the topic. Something like that can only be achieved with “cultural artefacts”, not with pure data or measurements.
The disappearance of sounds is to be treated on a collective level
The fact that the disappearance of sounds “must be dealt with on a collective level” came to him soon after his sound performance in 2019 in the Pinakothek der Moderne. At that time, upon request, he had started the installation “The end of the 20th century” by Joseph Beuys and made a work on the subject of “the silent forest”. The performance in Paris was the continuation, so to speak. And next year, as I said, the second edition of “Sonic Extinction” will continue.
As with Number One, however, the funding is needed first, says Liebfried, so that he, as artistic director, can pay everyone involved. In addition to a web designer, this also includes the composer and musician Beni Brachtel, who did the mastering and with whom Liebfried has been cooperating for a long time. Toronto-based Laura M. Ramsey will be co-curating the sequel. Geographically it should go to the “Global South”, to South America, Oceania, East Asia. And then the whole thing should fill up more and more like an archive, a “speculative encyclopedia”. Very slowly, with the images and sounds of a world that is unfortunately disappearing very quickly.