« sixty feet below, nature is absent » deals with the problem of ecology in times of ecological collapse. An ensemble of 10 performers interacts with a sonically and visually responsive space that crushes any sense of outsideness or observant perspective. The title is a somewhat humorous, yet naive comment on the way we perceive ourselves or the spaces we inhabit as detached or separate from nature, spaces that often times effectively try to function as a locus purged from processes that lie outside our control.
„It is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion nuclear bomb. […] The trouble with global warming is that it’s right here. It’s not behind a glass screen. It is that glass screen, but it’s as if the glass screen starts to extrude itself toward you in a highly uncanny, scary way that violates the normal aesthetic propriety [...] in which there should be a Goldilocks distance between you and the art object, not too close, not too far away. Global warming plays a very mean trick. It comes very, very close, crashing onto our beaches and forcing us to have cabinet meetings underwater to draw attention to our plight, and yet withdrawing from our grasp in the very same gesture, so that we can only represent it by using computers with tremendous processing speed.“
Timothy Morton, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World in posthumanities 27 (2013)
sixty feet below, nature is absent (2021-2022)
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Added on 18 March 2023
« sixty feet below, nature is absent » deals with the problem of ecology in times of ecological collapse. An ensemble of 10 performers interacts with a sonically and visually responsive space that crushes any sense of outsideness or observant perspective. The title is a somewhat humorous, yet naive comment on the way we perceive ourselves or the spaces we inhabit as detached or separate from nature, spaces that often times effectively try to function as a locus purged from processes that lie outside our control.
„It is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion nuclear bomb. […] The trouble with global warming is that it’s right here. It’s not behind a glass screen. It is that glass screen, but it’s as if the glass screen starts to extrude itself toward you in a highly uncanny, scary way that violates the normal aesthetic propriety [...] in which there should be a Goldilocks distance between you and the art object, not too close, not too far away. Global warming plays a very mean trick. It comes very, very close, crashing onto our beaches and forcing us to have cabinet meetings underwater to draw attention to our plight, and yet withdrawing from our grasp in the very same gesture, so that we can only represent it by using computers with tremendous processing speed.“
Timothy Morton, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World in posthumanities 27 (2013)
Credits and thanks
violin - Hannah Schoepe
viola - Catarina Marques
cello - Pirii Pimentel Rodrigues
flute - Isabelle Meraner
bass clarinet - Paula Häni
bass trombone - Jonas Inglin
accordion - Laura Mehmeti
percussion - Fabio Da Santos Silva
laptop/performance - Pierre Delignies
live electronics/composition - Felix Nussbaumer
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