Chris Watson
The Palm House, The Royal Botanic Gardens, London, UK
On entering and walking around the Palm House at Kew Gardens, the visitor becomes gradually surrounded by an array of unusual yet captivating sounds. Birdsongs, primate calls, insects buzzing, amphibians croaking – all echo and seep at hourly intervals through the plants and the trees of the 19th-century glasshouse. Spread between 80 speakers, the recordings were selected by sound recordist Chris Watson from his personal archive. Titled Whispering in the Leaves, the installation was originally produced in 2008 by the AV Festival in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and it now reaches London thanks to the joint production of music agencies Forma, and Sound and Music.
According to the official press release, the piece ‘will transport visitors to the dense rainforests of South and Central America through the recorded sounds of their native wildlife’. One could argue, though, that Whispering in the Leaves does not have a lot to do with being transported elsewhere; it is, instead, very much about being there – in the Palm House, at Kew, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds among unfamiliar plants, that act as bearers of a different perceptual dimension that is, in turn, is disclosed through listening.
Removed from their original settings, and placed in another location – just like the exotic plants in the glasshouse – Watson’s sounds were mostly gathered in almost inaccessible places and conditions. What happens then, when it is not objects or plants being collected, but sounds? There is sense underneath discourse, carried by these birdsongs and these insect buzzes, which eludes categorizations and opens up to a more haunting complexity. They do not create a fixed aural image, but a mutable surface that allows the listener to slide into the space of fiction: the time of the day, and the spatial distribution of sound, favour the emergence of an eventful auditory narrative, as you move around the foliage, at ground level in the blazing light of a summer day, or up in the canopy catching feeble rays of sun across the clouds.
As realistic as they may seem, a symbolic matrix necessarily mediates these field recordings. Watson often draws a parallel between Ansel Adams (whose photographs, Watson has commented are so ‘exquisitely composed and framed’ despite looking so ‘natural’) and his own approach, that relies too on framing a soundscape – not only spatially, deciding where to place the microphones, but also temporally, choosing to record at specific hours and seasons, with a specific idea of time rendition and compression. In addressing the issue of scientific representation in Pandora’s Hope (1999), Bruno Latour showed how it constantly pushes the world away and brings it closer: ‘In losing the forest, we win knowledge of it.’ Likewise, Watson’s aural re-presentations take shape across a combined sense of not belonging to those sounds, yet getting closer to them and to their texture across the experience of listening.
Watson invites the listener to pay attention to an uncanny sense of wonder: the exotic dimension in Whispering in the Leaves does not stand for an idyllic paradise, but calls for a closer scrutiny of what is unfamiliar. Across the interchanges between culture and nature, collection and recollection, Watson’s piece presents the rainforest as a place that is driven by non-human rhythms – its dark, threatening nature resonates, and although it does not belong to us, we are drawn to it. Watson calls it ‘an alien empire of insects and amphibians’, and he captures this alien dimension at the edge: in moments of transition, not only between night and day, as in the two sections of the installation, ‘Dawn’ and ‘Dusk’, but also from a habitual listening mode into a more peculiar one. By doing so, his sounds point – to quote the title of his first record, released by Touch in 1996 – at yet another way of ‘stepping into the dark’.
Daniela Cascella
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