Songs for the Storm to Come: “together we can move mountains” is part of the project Songs for the Storm to Come by Mikhail Karikis. This part takes the form of a constellation of eight videos.
The overall project focuses on collective and individual responses to the impending transformations as forecast by climate change scientists, and searches for ways to activate our trust in the possible and to imagine hopeful shared futures. Continuing his practice of collaboration with communities, Karikis worked with members of Manchester based SHE cooperative choir for women and non-binary people, and with sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. In Songs for the Storm to Come, the choir members observe maps sourced from climate modelling data, showing Britain’s transformed geography for 2050 as a result of rising sea levels. They reflect on the radical social and political changes required, and call for the power to bring us together to form communities in the face of these changes.
For the constellation of eight videos displayed on monitors, Karikis, in collaboration with the university sound researchers, utilised the vibrations of the participants’ voices to move and sculpt different materials such as sand, corn starch and water, through the use of cymatics. Suggestive of displays of rocks and minerals in natural history museums, these cymatics landscapes evoke the potential for collective action to “move mountains”: to resonate with the elements and conjure new shared horizons of hope and possibility.
The project engages with the urgency of climate change and proposes listening and communal sound-making as strategies to cultivate empathy, foster climate care, prepare for what is to come and activate our capacities for problem-solving. While rejoicing in the transformative power of sound, the project declares that changing the course of global warming is in our hands.
Credits:
Artist: Mikhail Karikis
Director of Photography: Jamie Quantrill
Sound researchers: Matteo Polato, Neil Bruce
