As part of the Museum 2050 international symposium, at He Art Museum, Foshan, Guangdong Province, China.

2020 will be remembered as the year where the global population was suddenly awoken to the precarity of our place on this planet. Many of the other contributors to the Musuem2020 conference this year touched on collaborations within an ecological context and the imminent movement of populations, both human and non-human, on an unprecedented scale. In this paper, I will take a slightly different tact. Collaboration is commonly thought of as something between two or more contemporary partners whether that is individual people, between groups or between other sentient living creatures. In an ever more precarious planetary reality, I will outline an argument for how we might turn our attention also to our on-going collaborations instead with geological bodies. These once living organic communities, now long-deceased, have accumulated into striated markers of deep-time on the rock-face of our planet’s surface. How might be collaborate with these planetary ancestors in order to hold a dialogue that extends – not only beyond our personal lifespans – but that of our species?

To remain in the contemporary for a moment though, I want to first establish the premise of collaborative practices with silence. My interest in this started with the intimacy of being with loved ones during their final hours, and experiencing the immense intimate communication amongst the silences of those spaces, as someone slips into death. Literary theorist Gayatri Spivak has suggested that silence is vital to communication. Describing language as both a material that can construct and as material that can give way, fraying into emptiness. She stresses the limits of language to translate meaning. Instead she argues that rhetoric exists in the silences between and around words. An active collaboration with the silences is therefore always required from the reader. As an example, I’d like to turn to the poetry of Myong Mi Kim, where this stealthy invisible code is core material to her writing. Kim carves out a poetic practice which positions itself in relation to the language that forms it, while also enacting Martin Heidegger’s premise that language always holds itself back in the process of coming into words: it reserves and silences. Her poems might at first seem to be mere poststructuralist abstraction, but as her words fluctuate between different linguistic structures, registers or textual formats, something far more fragile – and volatile – comes to the fore. In her long-form poem Dura, 1999, words are forcibly held apart by square brackets as if to forbid any further bridging or prevent them from spilling back into the empty space to infuse meaning with the previously penned words. For Kim, poetics is the ‘activity of tending the speculative’. The emptiness on the page is integral to its formation. Subjected to fracture and disruption, her semantic rearrangements are rife with voids, reticence and stillness. They are loaded with that which is unsaid, forgotten or cannot be articulated. And these silences force the reader to dwell in the pages’ animated emptiness. The poems are completed by the reader’s interpretation of the silences in their present context. And as such the poems are always a contemporary construction. Delineating a space that is under continual de- and re-construction, Kim’s silences introduce an unpredictable liveness to her words, always hung in the frenzied static of being and not being. Rather than historicised in their moment of writing, her poems instead act as notations: pliable and open to constant revision, always in collaboration with the now. It is within these blank spaces, these silent chasms – where meaning remains open – that the agency of the receiver is called upon and Kim converses with her future reader. Her silences present an infinite nowness, reverberating with the unspoken, the unknown and the possible.

Earlier this year, on a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, I read Kim’s book Dura in the shadow of Mount Rundle. In this immense mountain, which looms ominously and authoritatively over the Banff National Park, I sensed a similar silent reverberating dialogue, secreted among the unknowns in the mountain’s stoic and strata-ed rockface. Five hundred years of lives, climates and ecosystems are compressed in each centimetre of rock: accumulated demise forming the environment for the next, thrust upwards through fault lines, energy transferring from one form of matter to another. Like the gaps demarcated by Kim’s words, or like iron filings marking out a magnetic field, the stillness between Rundle’s strata mark out poignant silences, alive with poiesis. Geological silence does not seek permanence, but interaction and change, and in doing so becomes an accumulated narrative over deep extended time. As epochs lapse into their deceased silence, they have layered, merged and conversed with others, themselves silenced millennia ago.

This silent marker of absence has long been a universal communication, as has abstinence from disturbing it, enabling it to have continued legacy beyond our life. Take, for example, uncovered archaeological sites that are reburied for posterity, such as those at the ancient city of Kourion in Cyprus; the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc and Lascaux caves dating back some 30,000 years, resealed from the outside world, to be rediscovered by a future generation; or the ochre silhouetted handprints of Cueva de las Manos, added to by hundreds of hunters passing through the Argentinian valley from 11,000 to 7,000 BC, an ancient ‘I WOZ ’ERE’ imprinted on the rockface, the undisturbed messages still echoing 13 millennia later. Each handprint was made on the rockface in a knowing dialogue with those before them and those in the future, long after the maker’s death. Hidden below ground and left to take their natural course, fossilised Pleistocene footprints were uncovered by the spring tides in 2014 on the storm-lashed beaches of Happisburgh, UK. The oldest human footprints found outside Africa, dated between 850,000 and 950,000 years old, they were had survived so long only to have be erased by the eroding seas within a fortnight; a last cry from our ancestors, a death rattle, before receding into the depths to join other long-silent traces.

One of the oldest musical instruments ever found, a prehistoric flute carved from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, lay mute and undisturbed for 35,000 years. Allora & Calzadilla’s wonderful 2012 film Raptor’s Rapture shows a musician specialising in prehistoric instruments, as she animates this relic from the deep past in the presence of a living descendant of the ancient bird. Music was integral to forming early societal bonds. The language of the flute’s maker is long extinct, but this enduring object is a time capsule that continues a dialogue between this ancient community and the present.

Recognising that language collectively forms the way we see the world, literary critic George Steiner argues, ‘at almost at every moment in time … some ancient and rich expression of articulate being is lapsing into irretrievable silence’; each passing moment marks the extinction of other realities. For Heidegger, though, this is not a matter of decline into the past. In The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking he describes the unease and alienation of modes of communication as being in a constant, tireless cycle of receding, dying away and regenerating anew: a palintropic pattern of sentience developing and turning back in on itself, resurfacing in the future under different conditions. In confronting the manifold configurations of the past, striving to sound the depths of its silences, Heidegger positions latency, loss and oblivion as being central to human trajectories both past and possible, the moment of utmost fullness at once announcing a reversion into emptiness and vice versa. A scavenger, feeding on remains for millennia, the interaction between Allora & Calzadilla’s vulture and both raptor and human ancestors acts as a juncture between the long-silent remains, remainders, traces and the memory of our intertwined evolution. Endangered at the time of making the film, griffon vultures were on the brink of falling into the eternal silence of extinction. Now, happily, their numbers are soaring. Having survived this long, is it not possible that this prehistoric creature and flute might survive beyond humanity’s lifespan for perhaps another 35,000 years, silently continuing their binding duet?

This dialogue and collaboration with the long-dead past need not stop with human history however. In her influential publication, The Mushroom at the End of the World, exploring the damaged ecosystems of the contemporary anthropocentric planet, Anna Tsing writes about the ecology of recycled leftovers of capitalist over production using the term ‘salvaged rhythms’. I recently spent some time Cappadocia, in central Turkey, and realised that this process of salvaged rhythms extends to much longer time frames than those of merely contemporary capital. The breath-taking landscapes were formed by super-volcanos – vastly bigger than any that exist on the planet now. They spewed deep volcanic ash over the vast landmass, forming soft igneous tuff rock. The super-volcanos have long since died, leaving no trace as to where they once stood. The awe-inspiring landscape they left behind, eroded over into magical cavernous valleys. The landscape leant itself to cave dwellings and vast underground cities, easily carved out from the soft tuff. The volcanic land, rich with nutrients, could be farmed in abundance. The soft mountains side attracted pigeons into cave lofts and their droppings amassed below provided a rich fertilizer. And the carved underground networks provided natural refrigeration for the countries crop stockpiles. Whilst the sublime landscapes formed by the ash eruptions has meant that tourism has become the regions mainstay in recent years, modern life nevertheless continues to be in continuous and energetic dialogue with the long-extinct super volcanos from 10 million years ago.

In museum practices and the activity of history writing, we all too often feel compelled to delineate and taxonomize; a useful tool in some regards. But like Kim’s words, the earth’s crust does not seek statis or permanence, but on-going change and interaction amongst its stratums. The Cappadocian landscape is ever shifting, in dialogue with contemporary life, how it’s built upon, the impact of nearby reservoirs and global climate change. Though maybe not so visable, the same is true elsewhere. What we label as the Holocene, the Cretaceous or the Cambrian, are not finished, completed stories. They are always contemporary realities, in dialogue and collaboration with the era’s following them, those before, and the those us alive to converse with them in the present. I am currently in Yakutsk, which claims the title as the coldest city on the planet, in the depths of Siberia. It is a city built on permafrost. Millenia of organic environments are suspended in time beneath me. As the planet’s temperature has been rising, the melting permafrost is unleashing vast and yet unknown histories into our ecosytem. We are terrifyingly confronted with the deep-past’s resurfacing in the present. Writing on ‘nothingness’, theorist Karen Barad offers the image of a drumhead as a metaphor for the potential of the void: the perfect stillness of the taut drumhead is not assured because it has the potential for infinite indeterminate vibrations and energy fluctuations, Indeterminacies-in-action as she calls them. The same can perhaps be said of the latent life secreted in geological strata: they are still until they are not.

So, to go against the grain of neat historicization once more, not only does my proposal of innate collaboration and ongoing collective narrative with geological time refuse static taxonomy, it also refuses linearity. Manuel de Landa opens his book, A thousand years of nonlinear history, with a quote from Lucretius:

‘When atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall down-wards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus, nature would never have created anything.’

This seems like a suitable analogy for our innate collaboration throughout deep-time. We do not fall through time in a straight line, leaving the past behind us, forging an ever-new uninhabited path. We inevitably cross-fertilise, and in doing so we alter and shape contemporary positions. The past is entangled in collaboration with our present, and our present will be in entangled collaboration with the future. Here I turn to the work of artist Keira Greene, in particular her film Eustatic Drift (2018), narrated by graptolites. Having grown in vast colonies, the fossilised remains of these small marine organisms that emerged some 520 million years ago now mark their moment in time. ‘Everything about us now is rock / everything about us then was wet,’ professes Greene’s latent oracles, they continue ‘once we were plankton slouched in the ocean / but now we are code / surfaced and held in the laminae of rock like open scores.’  The film traces the immense cavernous landscapes, craggy edges and eroding waterfalls of the Dobs Linn landscape in Scotland, revealing the graptolites’ embalmed contemporary reality. When Heidegger wrote of language resurfacing, he was speaking in the context of human-specific language, but having evolved quickly, rapidly morphing throughout a 100m-year timespan and populating the world’s oceans, the graptolites are now valuable biostratigraphic markers in time – they can be read as a narrative, stretching Heidegger’s premise through to seemingly infinite time. Narrated in speculative collective voice, the fossilised beings reach out from within their deep-time slumber: ‘Billions of architects / we built micro-utopias / to live together in common corridors.’ Having maintained a certain biological mystery, dancer Katye Coe collaborates in a bodily call and response, unpacking the clues they left behind. She speculates on the possibilities of how they once moved in the ocean; but more knowingly her body traces their movement since extinction, in slow motion over the millennia, from horizontal to vertical, returning to horizontality. The graptolites’ solidity slowing them, her mortality unsteadying her; a collaborative dialogue across millennia of silences. Contemplating the transience of our species – our precarity more palpable now than ever before – Heidegger’s tireless cycle of communicative regeneration here transcends the linguistic; silence acts as the reagitating and resurfacing communication to surpass inevitable demise. As Greene’s graptolites profess, ‘everything that solidifies will speak again’.

In Bruno Latour’s 2018 essay Down to Earth, he writes of the feeling of our era: that of the ground being in the process of giving way. This new universal feeling has been compounded in our minds this year more than ever before. He writes: ‘each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip away beneath our feet. We are discovering, more or less obscurely, that we are all in migration towards territories yet to be rediscovered and reoccupied’. In our ever more precarious present, perhaps the only way to navigate our place in the world is to fully embrace our continued determined, collaboration with the silent resurfacing and palintropic turning of the Earth’s matter: past, present and possible. As the universe expands to its fullest point, in order to spring backwards, inwards to nothingness, the infinite impermanence of geological silences are alive with poiesis, both dependent and independent from its past, yet binding individual beings together with its collaborative agency throughout time.