Always calling home

Blog
24 June 2021

Always calling home is a sound sculpture to practice active listening of the memories of the asteroids. Asteroids are floating rocks, tiny planets and proxies of territories that existed within and out an original body, from which they got expelled, coagulated together, to be extracted or expelled again. Always calling home is also an exercise in order to speculate with near-futures and xenocapitalism in a post-colonial, post-anthropocentric framework.

The initial collaborators of the project, the mentor Dr. Daniel Cunnama (SAAO) and the postdoctoral researcher Dr. Nicolas Erasmus (SAAO) facilitated scientific training and raw data from Near-Earth Asteroids from the astronomical observatory in Sutherland. The asteroids reflect beams of light and fluctuate within a range of frequencies in and out of the visible spectrum. Sentinels secure their positions to capture patterns out of waffled memories and ultimately enabling droning dialogues of the yet-to-come. Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are celestial bodies that have orbits that bring them close to Earth's orbit. The majority have crossing orbits with the Earth and have potential risk to impact Earth causing mass extinction-related events like the recent Chelyabinsk airburst in 2013.

Whether celestial nor terrestrial, wandering rocks are core to different meaning-making processes in apparently opposite cultures: indigenous and modern or scientific ones. Both attempt to predict or simulate critical events that stress out communities and entire civilizations. For example, in indigenous Khoisan culture, certain rock gongs, special vibroacoustic boulders, are used to produce soundscapes and intersecting cosmovisions, weaving different socio-economical traces.

Fellow scientists and collaborators: Dr. Daniel Cunnama (SAAO, Mentor), postdoctoral researcher Dr. Nicolas Erasmus (SAAO, Fellow Scientist). Amanda Sickafoose (Head of Instrumentation Division), Hitesh Gajjar (Head of Electronics), Piet Fourie , Willie Koorts , Pieter Swanevelder , Michael Rust, Reggie Klein, Keegan Titus, Avahapfani Mulaudzi. Communication: Natalie Jones (Head of Communication). Engineering: James O’Connor (Head of Engineering), Egan Loubser. Mechanical Workshop: Craig Sass (Head of Workshop) & Lega Maerman. Supervisors Irène Hediger (Artists-in-labs ZHDK) and Flurin Fischer (Artists-in-labs ZHDK). Artist collaborators and helping minds and hands: Miranda Moss, Rhéa Dally, Mitchell Messina, Matthew King, Anitha van Deventer and last but not least Daniel Zea. Generously supported by ProHelvetia Johannesburg.

Always calling home

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