Around the same Sun (listen to the stones)
Kyriaki Goni creates a new video piece that tells the story of the Earth and Mars, from their creation, all the way up to the future. By speaking from the perspective of the stones that the planets both share, she is drawing attention to the different lenses through which the understanding of the world is built. These have the capacity to enforce or weaken the already known and established narrations by shifting our point of reference. Therefore, the centre of the work revolves around the power created by human-made definitions. What happens when we look through the stones, though? Is it possible to leave the human perspective, attributed meanings, and access new world orders?
The prologue concerns deep-past, the exchange of matter between the two planets, and the information that can be drawn out of its particles. While the next two chapters show the past and present through the human expansion on the Earth, the future’s narration is focused on the fourth planet (Mars). No matter whether this is due to the growing human population, the exploitation of the earth's resources, or the catastrophic vision of the consequences of the climate crisis, it exposes the belief that one species is superior to all the others. Goni underlines - the colonial strategy follows colonial terminology. And it has not changed, it just concerns further aspects of life and is reaching out to more than one planet.
Artist:
Title:
Around the same Sun (listen to the stones) [Wokoło tego samego Słońca (posłuchaj kamieni)]
Curators
Anna Czaban and Ewa Kozik
Co-production:
The Other Space Foundation, 2022
Even though the narration here is carefully plotted in the subtitles form, no word is uttered throughout the whole work. The stones hum and buzz like telegraphs, they sing the songs of the spears, which is calming and disturbing at the same time. Their communication is outside of the alphabet and human norms. Once we dare to leave the anthropocentric perspective, there are many more layers to this reality to discover and unfold. Physical manifestations have histories and riddles hidden inside of them, secret keys to the shift of the power dynamics. Everything is interdependent and intertwined.
The video “Around the same Sun (listen to the stones)” orbits around the star of our solar system that is present at the centre of the frame and never goes out of sight. It is like an indicator that directs us but, also, leaves us blind.
Artist’s note
In the short story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” Ursula K. LeGuin describes an academic journal dedicated to the study of “Therolinguistics”, namely of non-human languages such as Ant, Penguin and others. In the last section the editor writes about the possible future developments on the field, where linguists will presumably be able to recognize the language of the plants, and even that of the rocks, the stones, the volcanoes.
Stones are maybe the oldest material formations. They hold the memory of the world. Around the same Sun (listen to the stones) gathers fragments of these memories of two stones NWA7034 and a Pilbara rock.
NWA (Northwest Africa) 7034 is a space rock, recovered from the Western Sahara of Africa in 2011. It’s the oldest Martian igneous rock ever identified. It formed 4.5 billion years ago and slammed into Earth after an asteroid impact sent it flying across space five to ten million years ago. Only in 2022 scientists managed with the help of artificial intelligence to pinpoint the exact origin site of the oldest Martian meteorite.
Pilbara rock comes from the homonymous region in north Western Australia and it is the oldest rock formation on Earth, 3.45-billion-year-old fossil stromatolites. Pilbara is a place that has been and still is heavily extracted, but it is also home to Aboriginal indigenous people who are strongly connected to the ancient land.
What are these two rocks remember? Recent complex events of terrestrial history, colonization, technology advancements and new space exploration. What does language used in new space exploration today reveal? Will humanity repeat the mistakes of the past? Is listening to other than human or even speaking to other than human going to help decenter human POV from the future worlds?