The Ear of the Storm - yd
- Author: Nicolás Jaar
- Publication: Oceanic Refractions
- URL: https://www.oceanicrefractions.org/?article=the-ear-of-the-storm
- Date: February 23, 2024
I.
The eyes have eyelids, the ears do not close.
They can’t; the inner ear holds a small fluid-filled cavity—the cochlea—that, together with the vestibular apparatus, is essential for equilibrium and how we sense the world. It helps us navigate our environment and maintain stability in motion. To hear is to balance. Listening is equilibrium.
Equilibrium is survival.
II.
The eye of the storm is a region of calm weather at the center of a cyclone, a circular area, surrounded by an “eyewall”, a ring of towering thunderstorms.
I am in a morgue in Berlin in 2024. I am in the eye of the storm.
I look up and see, written in German: “Please rest”.
It is quiet as I prepare to enter Oceanic Refractions. It is quiet in the eye of the storm.
The ears do not close.
III.
I enter the installation. It is housed in the Kuppelhalle, the mourning hall of the morgue.
Above and around the installation screens, a columbarium houses a series of small storage spaces built for funerary urns which house cremated remains of the dead.
The term ‘columbarium’ comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for birds.
There are no birds in this columbarium, and no urns, either. Instead, we hear testimonies of Fijian, i-Kiribati and Papua New Guinean elders while the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean refracts onto the empty urn holders. This morgue is underwater. The mourning here is liquid.
Since 2012, the morgue has been called Silent Green. The couple who bought the property and turned it into a cultural institution explained the reason behind the name to a Berlin-based magazine: “After we bought [the morgue], we were sitting on the grass outside and thinking about where we were. It’s silent, it’s green… Silent Green.”1
To listen is, first and foremost, to imagine.
What kind of silence is this?
IV.
There are many faces of silence.
Silence under torture is bravery, under injustice, cowardice. It can signify death – a body no longer breathes and it can signify life - they stared at each other in silence. It can be heard in the tranquility of a newborn, the stillness of a lake, the respect for an elder, the devotion of a ritual, the incommensurability of the night sky. There is an eerie silence after destruction. There is the silence of grief.2 The silence of a tomb and the double silence of an unmarked tomb.
As waters rise and entire relational webs are forced silent in the Pacific and elsewhere, the autopsy reveals the silence of complicity, of greed. The silence of laissez-faire. An air-conditioned office building. A stale courtroom. Datasheets. Profit margins.
[Interruption: buzzkill]
A foreigner buys 3,000 hectares of land in the south of Chile.3 An entire lake and its surrounding hills. A small country, he says. He looks out onto the lake from his vacation home and sighs. Finally, some silence, he thinks, as a bee flies into the window pane.
He is questioned about the amount of land. Conservation4, he answers, as he makes his way up through the property via a narrow path of felled trees. He hasn’t gone up this way in a while, so he drives back down to get a chainsaw, to cut a few thick branches that block the way.
The buzz of the saw slashes through the forest. Its engine’s cessation makes onlookers exhale a sigh of relief. Silence, again, they think, as a wind moves noisily through the remaining leaves.
To colonize is to hear silence in a forest of screams.5
IV.
Can we autopsy the world?
“It’s silent, it’s green… Silent Green.”6
What places have to be loud for here to be so quiet?
What places have to flood for here to be so dry?
These are the questions we ask from the eye of the storm, or rather, the ear of the storm, this ear which looks out onto that ring of towering thunderstorms and high winds.
From this city, this morgue, from these ashes that are no longer here and from this silence that I struggle to hear as silence, I think of what the Pacific elders say: We have one mouth but two ears.
What kind of attentiveness is needed? How urgent is a space for listening?
Enough podiums; we need an entire urn to hold this listening as it once may have held a million ashes, a million stories, a million warnings, a million other listenings. We must autopsy the world.
Autopsy, from αὐτός (self) and ὀπτός (seen; visible). Learning the cause of death as seeing-the-self.
The pathologist whispers: “It is impossible to hold an autopsy after cremation.”
And yet we still enter the urn of the world as ashes do, and we listen with the attentiveness of an ear that has no mouth to account for it. It is a free ear. Held in equilibrium.
There is an island of listening outside of enunciation. Survival speaks from the crevices of our inner ear: “Do not flood it with more words: it is already a flood of silence.”
VI.
Around 2005, the remains of a twelve-year-old boy were found in Carrascal, Quinta Normal, an hour’s walk from the center of Santiago, Chile. The boy had been buried, sometime between 1470 and 1540 AD, with his flute next to his head, in the position of being played.7 The flute is said to have been perforated in a ritual before burial so that it would no longer make sound.
What kind of silence is this?
A flood of silence. It is not just the silence of an unplayed flute. It is the silence of unplayability. Un-soundability. The perforated flute makes the air flow too well from one place to another, leaving no constriction to allow for sound to take place any longer.
In the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Santiago, Chile, the exhibit Quiebres y Reparaciones shows three perforated flutes, each found in different parts of the country. Flautas matadas, they’re called. Killed flutes. The wall text says that “the phenomena of intentional breakages across the Americas reveal a complex interplay between material and immaterial realms.”
A Mapuche elder, who happened to visit the exhibition gives a hint to one of the curators after seeing the evasiveness of meaning in the wall text: “When the cause of death is not clear,” he says, “an autopsy is done to the body by way of the perforated object. It is a way to learn the cause of death.”8
The flute must be perforated, unplayable, and silenced to learn the cause of death.
What kind of silence do we need to be able to autopsy the world?
To listen is, first and foremost, to imagine.
The ears do not close. Imagination does not sleep. A politics that stems from listening is a politics of imagination. A politics of the unseen, from the unseen: the inner ear of the world.
Written in English (American)
Published on April 22, 2024
Nicolás Jaar Nicolás Jaar, 34, was born in New York to Chilean parents and raised between Santiago and New York. Since 2008, he has released music under various guises, spanning shades of pop, ambient, noise, and club music. Since 2013, he has curated the Other People label, which releases experimental electronic and acoustic music. In recent years, Nicolás has focused on education, teaching sound-editing and listening workshops to emerging musicians and non-musicians alike in institutions such as the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago, Chile; Sonica in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Dar Jacir and Alrowwad in Bethlehem, Palestine; and many others. His latest project is called Archivos de Radio Piedras, a 17-episode radio play set in the near future in Chile. His debut collection of stories, Isole, was released by Timeo, an Italian publishing house, in February 2024. Nicolás is also part of the research collective Shock Forest Group, the band Darkside, and was one of the founders of Musicians for Palestine.
jaar.site / X: @nicolas___jaar / Instagram: @nicolasjaar
Cite this article Nicolás Jaar, “The Ear of the Storm,” Oceanic Refractions, (April 2024), edited by Elise Misao Hunchuck, AM Kanngieser, and Merewalesi Nailatikau. https://www.oceanicrefractions.org/?article=the-ear-of-the-storm