What do you feel underground?

Underground do you feel
the delicate warmth of this spring?
Does the sharp perfume of honeysuckle
reach you through the earth?

Do you remember the sky,
the clear jets of mountain water,
the shimmering summit?
Do you remember the deep – tapestried path,
my still hand in your trembling hand?


WHAT DO YOU FEEL UNDERGROUND? / with Lucrecia Dalt

3. Necropolitical Song  

Google Ngrams 
detects, determines, orders
 words and their various assemblies
 algorithms that result in time-worn ontologies 
among millions of volumes 
amassed
 in data centers

  and I still think reductionist substances: 
How many times can an expression, 
the association of two or more, 
be used? 
Which ones disappear?

  The black mirror reveals others acting
 "Artificial Life"
 from Frankenstein 1918 
to predicting large data 
you descends from its summit 
among millions of thoughts  

It would be better mutating
 It designs bacteria It reads, 
cuts and pastes
fragments of DNA

  I am a living machine
 riding a comet
 fallen into the prebiotic broth
 millions of years without balance
 I have an internal programme
 I am a cell designed 
not by a higher intelligence
 I am a potential tumour 
a machine within a machine  

Sometimes I lose
 the order of initial assembly 
my chromosomes
 the markers
 I don’t detect 
they simulate me to understand me
 they program me to disappear
 but death itself fails  

Living under the late modern occupation
 is to be permanently
 in the pain of fortified structures
 it is standardizing a certain madness
 here we test with life but also with death

  Terror, death and freedom 
are static concepts of temporality and politics
 if my machine is a slave
 that tumour is lack of freedom in my colonized body 
the same lack is the way I bear my mortality in mind
  Cell suicide is also
 in the simplest life forms it was there in the early seas
 it lives on in algae and in viruses. 

Death is my agencying
 It is precisely the place from where and on which I have power And then my body grows, 
it advances,
towards the darkness.


NECROPOLITICS

2. Revenant Song: Against abyssal thinking

Something strange has been always happening with my names:
As the owners of the abyssal thinking, always give me the scariest ones
or, suspicious of the value of words and symbols,
they make them disappear

I, in the meantime,
codify
decipher
encrypt
linguistic and genetic actions

they erase inscriptions with layers of paint
they burn birthmarks
they impale
the slit open
they protect me well, they armor-plate me
they store me
like a file
a volume of data
they hurry me
to the other side of the line

they produce me non-existent
underground fetish
they do not realize
that I am dialectical
that I am co-present

Hail
Lamasthu
diabolic daughter
of the God of Heavens
lion-headed
bird-clawed
nursemaid of hounds and pigs
of non-human tendencies
Lilith
Espectra
Lamia
Procris
Penthesilea
Empusa
Harey

We are a pictogram
a first code
of cuneiform writing
in obsidian boards
in interfaces where
our awareness
is a state of matter
our identity
a vector

And those satellites
drones
mortal algorithms
do not know yet
of internal
behaviours

Ω
∫Terra[X]n = ∫∫∫∫...∫∫Terra(X1,X2,X3,X4,...,Xn,t) dX1 dX2 dX3 dX4...dXndt = Terrapolis
α
X1 = stuff/physis, X2 = capacity, X3 = sociality, X4 = materiality, Xn = ??
α (alpha) = not zoë, but EcoEvoDevo’s multispecies epigenesis
Ω (omega) = not bios, but recuperating terra’s pluriverse
t = worlding time, not container time, entangled times of past/present/yet-to-come

REVENANT

1. Song of extremophilia: Descende, audax, viator, et terrestre centrum attinges

I have lost count of the time I have been here
I do not really know
but the suitable conditions have taken place to wake up
after several centuries
not knowing how much I could bear
because nobody ever trusts.
This is a lake, I know that.
A lake or a swamp or a river.
Rio Tinto.
Or a pit
And that red acidic water I dye
I metabolise.
I thank my philia for my extreme conditions
The dissent, the dysfunctionality, my abnormal enzymes
even if I do not exist, if they do not conceive me nor classify me
being innumerable, unthinkable
I dwell the furthest, Urras and Anarres
the deepest, the most poisoned, the eight circles of hell, Bacillus Infernus
Deception Island
Xerophile, I have desiccated myself
Halophile, in the Dead Sea
Audaxviator

Verne’s Bold traveler.

60 degrees, isolated, without oxygen, in the dark inside a gold mine in South Africa.
I am an ecosystem of one single species
My mineral environment is dead
I have built my organic molecules
from the decay of uranium,
from the moisture of the soil,
from the inorganic carbon of the rocks,
from nitrogen, from ammonium
here we know neither pure oxygen nor the sun
I have not seen the light for more than 3 million years
This is Mars and Enceladus

mm.rnlls esreuel seecJde
sgtssmf unteief niedrke
kt,samn atrateS Saodrrn
erntnael nuaect rrilSa
Atvaar .nxcrc ieaabs
Ccdrmi eeutul frantu
dt,iac oseibo kediiY

tolerating arsenic
enduring radiation
psychrophile, thermophile,
I fell with the red rain of Kerala
They said my origins were extraterrestrial
from the left hand of darkness
where only the uprooted live
from the consciousness of Faustine
thence descends, Audax Viator
until reaching the center of the Earth


EXTREMOPHILE

We Are a Plot Device is a sound piece realized by Lucrecia Dalt and Regina de Miguel and commissioned by Reina Sofía Radio. It's a three-voice choral piece that departs from different references like that of Sylvia Plath’s poem Three Women, or the mythological triple deity such as Hesperides, Parcae, Charites, Moirai, Horae and Gorgons.

This podcast is build as a chant in the form of an oracle dialogued between Lamella, Chimera and Gaiasa; myths of the past and myths to build. Lamella is an object that combines characteristics of animal, machine and desire; Chimera is the crystallization of utopia; Gaiasa emanates from the theories of Gaia and Endosymbiosis formulated by Lynn Margulis. In their dialogue, Lamella, Chimera and Gaiana produce a technology of fiction situated in the grey zone that separates life and nonlife.




We Are A Plot Device

Cuentan que 
En una época de mitos
Indiferenciada del ensueño
Y sin distinción 
Entre hembras o machos,
Seres humanos o bestias
Hubo un momento final:
el momento del crimen 


Cada partícula de polvo alberga una visión única de la materia, un movimiento, una colectividad, interacción, afecto, diferenciación, composición y una oscuridad infinita. 

Desde entonces, 
Atroz y solapada triunfadora,  
Hago guiños, 
Desde todos los rincones

AURA NERA

visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem


V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is a performance of Lucrecia Dalt and Regina de Miguel commissioned by the CTM Festival and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin that invokes the enunciation of new alchemical formulas of affective resistance faced with extractivist imageries, the geographies of violence linked to these and the technological and cultural mechanisms of representation.

I contain
An impossible object, full of faces, possessed,
Domineering
Dominated
Infinite, increasing in thousands of ramifications
Shining in the mirrors, on the screens
Projecting states of violence
Latent and evident
I am the same mineral
The same gold
The elemental substance of desire
Mutating
Alchemically

V.I.T.R.I.O.L.

This set of images tries to make memory about the events happened in the Mines of Rio Tinto in Huelva. 

In the oldest mine of the humanity also took place the first ecological manifestation of the history. 

It was in 1888, the Year of the Throws. 

That territory was called Palus Erebea, Laguna Erebea or Estigia, the one that gave access to Hades, that is to say to Hell. And in the same estuary of the rivers Odiel and Tinto, every spring and with the first stems of wheat, Persephone, maiden, queen of Iron, goddess of the underworld, received her human sacrifices.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Esta fundación tendrá lugar 
sin guerreros ni condenados
Sin esclavos,
Nobles, 
Clero,
Comerciantes,
Ciudadanos ordinarios
Vírgenes ni voluntarios. 
Sin ritos preliminares
Ayunos ni penitencias
Ejecuciones ni ofrendas
Sin sacrificios privados
Sin sepulcros 
En la base de pirámides o torres
No toleraremos ónfalos
Guardaremos la obsidiana
Pues no precisaremos sangre
Para regar esta hoguera.
Fundaremos,
Pero no en Tierra Firme
Con la materia rebelde
Y la piedra en movimiento
Greda y no polis 
Nunca axis mundi
Fundaremos 
En el núcleo de una esfera ardiente
Entre la lava líquida y
La atmósfera venenosa
Montañas meteoritos cayendo como 
Primitivas  cabezas nucleares 
Y siempre activas contra las adversidades del mundo
Volveremos, una y otra vez, a nuestro pisoteado suelo
Entre raíces negras y suaves 
Para alimentar anónimamente la vida, 
Fundemos
Pongamos las bases
De una relación abismática 
Que como la existencia, 
Todo resista salvo 
La tentación.

FUNDACIÓN

This is a story of biopower and biosociality, as well as of technoscience.

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.

Ansible shows a space, sound and light display that is arranged to represent recognizable aspects and references at sites such as: laboratories, seed banks and environments for the controlled cultivation of artificial life in living organisms; stores of geological samples and herbarium collections found in contexts such as the Madrid Centre for Astrobiology, associated to NASA; in vitro cultivation of endangered species in the Sao Paulo Botanical Garden; the Institute of Volcanology within the University of Barcelona; the Santiago de Chile Museum of Natural Sciences; and the Seed Bank in Vicuña (northern Chile).

In the recreation of this environment we will not find the usual stabilizing elements but rather others which introduce formal and symbolic variables that contradict the utilitarian logic of scientific simulation or artificial maintenance of life forms to accommodate speculative thinking. Instead of germinating seeds in petri dishes (a simulation of lives that can no longer be found in their endemic ecosystems), we will find fossils of various different plant species which have disappeared or are in danger of extinction, found in historical archives and subsequently carved out on the specular surfaces of obsidian rocks.

This material (crystallized lava) has historically been attributed with being able to connect different worlds; a magic screen or interface between different realities. Here, taken as a dialectical object, it materializes as a fossil, but also as a mirror. This material has the vitreous nature of the vials of seed stock, however it has been processed as a lapidary object; it is a memento mori where materials which act in two different directions are constantly intertwined. On the one hand, they make up the "raw material" of existence, on the other, they point to the problems of a planet in crisis, where we see ourselves as fossils of a future universe, not devoid of life, or thinking - but maybe of ourselves.
In addition two actions will take place in the room with the producer and experimental musician, Lucrecia Dalt, and the programmer and performer, Jan Mech. The constant light temperature, which is usually essential for maintaining artificial life, will be changed using Arduino programming, following the modulation of four sound and text compositions (played by automaton voice overs), which go through dreamscapes of resilient lives; from extremophile sciences, necropolitics, extractivism and artificial life... etc.

* Ansible (from the English word, answerable) is a term coined for science fiction by the writer, Ursula K. Leguin, who describes her invention in her 1974 novel "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia". 



DALT_DEMIGUEL

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