I recently learned about this very beautiful and poetic work when going through the Manifesta 9 catalogue. Presented as an audio-visual installation, Sounds from Beneath is a project by the artist Mikhail Karikis centred around a vocal sound work in which he invited a coal miners choir (Snowdown Colliery Male Voice Choir) to recall and sing the subterranean sounds of a working mine. Then he invited the visual artist Uriel Orlow to collaborate with him on the creation of a video in which the colliery choir sing on top a disused Kentish mine where the men used to work. Sounds from Beneath brings a desolate coalmine back to life through song. A colliery once populated with workers, machines and the sounds of their activities transforms into an amphitheatre haunted by resonating sounds of explosions in the ground, machines cutting the coal-face, shovels scratching the earth and the distant melody of the Miners Lament, all sung by the choir grouping in formations reminiscent of picket lines. Sounds from Beneath continues Mikhail Karikiss exploration of notions of the stranger and his engagement with the voice as a sculptural material, investigating diverse vocal acts and the marginalisation of voices. In addition to the work being a meditation on singing as an act of resistance and community, it ruminates upon the relationship between the human voice and the machine, reflects on the under-representation of old voices, while celebrating communal music-making.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 00:02:26 +0000
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