Paper short abstract:

A practice based presentation exploring how a natural burial for a relative leads to speculations on our affective relationships with transience, through time spent listening to frequencies from the soil. N.B. If good quality speakers are available it would be possible to include field recordings.

Paper long abstract:

Presentation of art-based research on how undertaking a natural burial for a close relative led to realisations about the difficulty Western secular societies have dealing with death, dead bodies and transience. There are of course different types of deaths and dying is not a monolithic experience, but this presentation will argue, with Akomolafe, that we need different approaches to dying and thinking about life that are not so distant from demise, dying, compost, grief and loss .

I speculate on how a different set of affective relationships might be triggered through listening to the ground, a space overlooked because it is over-trodden. For centuries, many cultures have interred their dead. Creating an audible connection with frequencies from the soil might open different material relations with the ground; its processes, the living, the dead and the inert.

Part of this conjecture concerns the effective dynamics involved in listening to sounds that are not every day noises. There are questions alongside how we perceive sound itself; its ephemeral nature, and (through the testimony of workshop participants) its use as a lament and its ‘state of either emergence or decay’ are key. My aim is to explore how soil vibrations might initiate more lively ways of engaging with essential transience.