Second collaboration with artist Jonas Staal, leading to a large scale installation in which a six hour surround electronic music piece is embedded. Four performers move around in the space, singing, chanting, carrying banners, performing a ritual that celebrates and mourns life, human life, non-human life, all life that ever lived, all life that will live after us, and all life that never will live because of the destructive capitalism that led to the climate catastrophe that we are in.
Duration: 6 hours.
Commissioned by November Music and Het Noord Brabants Museum.
Creative team
Music: Micha Hamel
Visual artist: Jonas Staal
Research: Nadine Gouders
Architect: Paul Kuipers
Graphic design: Remco van Bladel
Animal visualisations: Tom Estrera III
Sound design: Tomas Valecka
Performers
Singer: Khadija Massaoudi
Singer: Jasper Schweppe
Performer: Inez Nuijten
Trombone: Koen Kaptijn
Musicians on tape
Singer: Maria Goetze
Choir: Capella Brabant and their conductor Marc Versteeg
Electronic music created at Studio Willem Twee, Den Bosch.
Banners created in collaborations with the TextielLab of the TextielMuseum
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EARTH WORKERS REQUIEM/JUBILATE
EARTH WORKERS
UNITE
EARTH WORKERS OF ALL TIMES
UNITE
UNITE
EARTH WORKERS
ALL TIMES UNITE
EARTH WORKERS
WORKERS OF EARTH
UNITE
WORKERS OF EARTH, OF ALL TIMES
UNITE
EARTH WORKERS UNITE
TIMES
EARTH WORKERS UNITE
ALL TIMES
ALL TIMES UNITE
EARTH WORKERS
EARTH WORKERS OF ALL TIMES
UNITE
EARTH WORKERS
UNITE
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Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate is a large-scale musical and visual installation, a collaborative work by composer Micha Hamel and artist Jonas Staal. Inspired by geological time scales of the deep past and deep future, the musical composition consists of a six-hour work for surround electronic music, intersected at intervals by instrumental and vocal interventions. The visual installation is a landscape composed of fossils from deep earthly pasts – from motor oil to fossilized ammonites – and images of what will likely constitute the fossil archive of the future.
Not only do humans work, but animals, plants and bacteria also perform forms of labor. Over long periods of time, this collective work produces a livable biosphere. We are all “Earth Workers” – in the words of writer Radha D’Souza.
The musical performance of Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate consists of echoes from a deep past, human and electrically generated sounds, as well as sounds from the deep future, performed six hours a day for 10 days, and can be visited any time of day. These intense layers of sound seek to commemorate and represent earth workers across different time periods, as a contemporary version of the International, uniting all the workers of the earth – not only humans – and all the time periods of the earth.
The landscape-like installation in which the composition is staged consists of various types of fossils such as petrified ammonites, placed on black wedges soaked in motor oil that refer to revolutionary constructivist art. The ammonite here is literally the fossil in fossil fuel. Between them, woven banners are rigged with images of plants and animals that thrive precisely in climate crisis. They are the fossils of the future.
In this way, deep past and deep future become audible, visible and tangible in the temporal landscape, a place of contemplation, crisis and protest at the same time. Visitors are invited to take their place in the landscape as fossils-in-the-making among the fossils of the past and future. As earthworkers among earthworkers, prompted by radical solidarity.
