Sesión de escucha
Mz Baltazar’s Lab, Viena (AU)

síntesis

‘Revolutions on the Surface of the Earth’ es

Una sesión de escucha colectiva como parte del programa público de la exposición «What leaves, speaks»

Playlist Curada entiende la escucha como una forma de relacionarse con el territorio, la memoria y la tierra. En esta ocasión, Gris García presentará más detalles sobre el proyecto comisariado por material ●○ inmaterial «El sonido de una montaña que muere» en un montaje performático para el evento titulado «Revolutions on the Surface of the Earth».

 

Con las investigaciones sonoras de Ana Hernández, Anahita Norouzi, Bárbara Foulkes, Carlos Edelmiro, Concepción Huerta, Erika Loana (Atlas Materia Prima), Emilija Skarnulyte, Hanae Utamura, Lorena Mal, Long Pan, Perla Mata y Sofia Acosta.

Concepto y montaje sonoro: Lorena Mal

Mastering: Carlos Edelmiro

Montaje de texto para sesión de escucha basado en los escritos de todxs lxs artistas : Lorena Mal

 

info

comparte: Playlist Curada: Gris García

cuando: viernes 19 de junio 7pm a 10pm, 2026
donde: Mz Baltazar’s Lab, Jägerstrasse 52-54, 1220 Viena

registro: @mzbaltazarslab

 

[Image: Long Pan, Wind Bell, 2021. Video + installation; single channel video, HD, color, 14 ’9”, copper bells; plant ash; Circuit boards]

In ancient times, copper slept inside the mountains

First as magma

now fills our soil, plants, and even human hair and placentas

scattered as residues from copper ore mining

We are in Guiyu, a small town located on the outskirts of Shantou, China

Declared the most toxic place on Earth

 

The wind chime coexists with this land

The wind sounds terraform into the sound of an ancient ocean

 

We are in Tepexi de Rodríguez, in Mexico

In the top of a mountain, of a fossil landscape

Where stones speak

We submerge into the depths

 

into a mine in Poland under the sea

 

Toxic debris everywhere, we go further.

Further into the last glacier in Mexico, the Chichonal volcano, boiling

bubbles and small gurgles of hot water and calcified stone

a vast body sleeping beneath the surface

a fragile body of rocks that appeared solid

but the volcano’s heat renders them hollow

hollow

a drill goes further into a mountain making a void for more toxic residues

the walls of an underground tunnel in Lithuania

the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant 

the sounds of the volcano’s insides boil stronger

something breathes in the night

like a night hunting under the soil

into a geologic body in the mountains of Iran

the drillings of the British Petroleum Company

the sound frequencies that seek for oil, thirsty

a sonar that travels in stone just as a whale’s call would travel in the ocean

an ancient sea full of future fossil bodies

exploited and burned

the mountain opens into fossils

 

we listen the stones of Tlayúa Quarry in the mixtecan territory in Mexico

 

we drown in the Axamilpa river, the last remaining body of water

 

we listen, to the wind chime again moving with the tides

 

the ocean returns

 

the world is flooding

in earth shattering disasters

everything disappears and the stone writes

 

floods of human-made toxicity

we are in Torreón, north of Mexico

in a metallurgy

 

we listen to 70% zinc turned into sound frequency

 

22% iron

 

2% silver

we are in Horonobe Japan

miles underground managing radioactive waste

in deep subsurface environments

we are still in the nuclear plant in Lithuania, still falling apart

a snake slithers over an abandoned mission control

 

In a dream

Tomorrow was Yesterday

Future was Past

A day

a week

a month

a year,

a hundred

a thousand

a million

billion

years

Says a voice through the tunnels

Fault means responsibility.

Whose fault is it?

Who is at fault

A fault in geology, is a crack in the Earth’s crust.

We are inside a fault in the Earth’s surface, breaking

here

together

we receive telephatic messages

from the Ecuadorian Amazon

nightmares, which emerge from the underground

insisting again and again

there, where listening becomes territory

and territory becomes possibility for relation

the waves, like dreams, return

they circle around us

invisible radiowaves, invisible radiations, invisible tides

a circular temporality

water returning to water

soil returning to soil

 

we are inside the comixcal vessel from the Itsmo of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca

we are that rain that sounds like seeds falling

the void here is an open mouth

 

we listen to a distortion

krrr—krrr—piiiiii—piiii—beepbeep—shhhk—shhhk— krrrzzzt—wiiiiii—wiiiiii—fshhhhhhhh

it gets us closer to the amazonian territory

its organization

the rivers

the anger

the perseverance

and to the hope of all amazonian communities

that resist to displacement and looting

We listen to the soft echo of a violin singing Yanda Pullu

a song by Mishki Chullumbu, from the Napo Runa pueblo

6 decades of his life dedicated to rescue their memory and music

Like the rain, our hands hit the soil of the comixcal

 we move our bodies as matter

when we are dead we will be compressed

 

and the Earth will take a new shape again

 

as she always does

the amplified sound of the memory of Earth story

the memory in erosion

the memory in burning

coal breaks into steam with a train in the north of Mexico carrying construction materials 

from a mountain to places

there’s rhythm and dance and destruction

there are machines

there’s heat and sweat and flesh

there is pressure

1200 watts

interruptions of noise and profit

a new void opens

dynamite inside her body

the sound of a mountain dying 

Lorena Mal

Zapotengo Oaxaca, June 2026

Script for ‘Revolutions on the Surface of the Earth’ assembled by Lorena Mal for a performative lecture based on conversations with and writings by Sofia Acosta, Carlos Edelmiro, Bárbara Foulkes, Ana Hernández, Concepción Huerta, Erika Loana (Atlas Materia Prima), Lorena Mal, Perla Mata, Anahita Norouzi, Loong Pan, Emilija Skarnulyte y Hanae Utamura.

Sobre Playlist Curada

Playlist Curada es un proyecto iniciado por Gris García en 2022 que invita a artistas, comisarixs, investigadorxs y escritorxs a compartir sus ideas, intereses y referencias, o a expandir sus investigaciones a través de listas musicales.

El proyecto busca servir como una plataforma para acceder a diversos materiales sonoros, desplegándose tanto en formato digital como de manera presencial a través de activaciones.

En las diversas propuestas se pueden encontrar listas musicales para dibujar, escribir o incluso para hacer el amor; sonidos oníricos para el estado de vigilia, para encontrarnos con nuestros sueños, o bien para despertar de la siesta; canciones para bailar sentadxs y cumbias con filtro antimachista. Así como investigaciones de artistas quienes se adentran en exploraciones sonoras en torno a su práctica o realizan recorridos sonoros para situarnos en sitios específicos.

Sigamos creando playlists, no recomendadas por algoritmos, que nos acompañen en el día a día sea para escribir, dibujar, dormir, follar, transitar, trabajar o simplemente, estar.

Sobre Baltazar's Laboratory

Jägerstrasse 52-54, 1200 Vienna, Austria.

https://www.mzbaltazarslaboratory.org/what-leaves-speaks/