Artist: Lamin Fofana
Exhibition title: Notes on Planetary Living
Venue: fluent, Santander, Spain
Date: November 30, 2023 – February 9, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and fluent, Santander
Notes on Planetary Living transforms fluent’s glass pavilion into a resonance box. The sound piece giving the exhibition its title, expands through an immersive installation that takes John Bergers’ Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead, as a departure point exploring how life and death share a common sonic space, as well as the poetic dimension that often blurs the interaction between the two.
The brutality we are witnessing today, in the last months of 2023 is unbearable. But it’s not a new form of brutality, it is just the pressure of an ongoing form of violence releasing to a more perceptible layer of the world. The kind of brutality predating and consuming Western civilization since the invention on time. And so, does music predate humanity. As Kim Stanley teaches us, ‘‘since 160 million years, music was the first human language, and still is the language of animals and birds[1] .”
The bird song at the core of Notes on Planetary Living was recorded on Monday, June 14, 2020 at 4:41 AM in Ernst-Thälmann Park behind Berlin’s Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Prenzlauer Berg. The atmospheric prejudice as an African in the West serves as a constant reminder of the power structures and inherent institutional dangers that make accessing spheres of whiteness in “normal” times –not only in this tragic and cruel time of civilizatory decay– an act of resonance. The simple act of living, of ‘‘occupying a space that is both sonically uncontainable and heard[2].”
Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what is beyond it, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material.
His latest releases include Black Metamorphosis, Darkwater, and Blues (an album trilogy) . Recent exhibitions include Dark Waters at Tate Liverpool, (2023) Ballad Air & Fire for Preis der Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2021); a call to disorder at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2021); Life and Death by Water for the Liverpool Biennial 2021; WITNESS at 57th Venice Biennale (2017); and performances at Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece (2017).
In 2021, Fofana was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants and was nominated for the National Gallery Prize in Germany. Fofana hosts a monthly radio show on NTS Radio, an online station based in London.
On Friday December 1st, at 8 p.m. Lamin Fofana will perform live at Archivo de la Autoridad Portuaria. Calle Marqués de la Ensenada, 12.
This series of projects, as well as his contributions to PRAXIS, are kindly supported by Ayuntamiento de Santander ,Fundación Santander Creativa and Gobierno de Cantabria.
[1] Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (2012).
[2] Sandra Ruiz, Extract from: Resonances: A Conversation on Formless Formation. e–flux Issue #121 (October 2021)
