REVIEW Dec 2024 ‘Mikhail Karikis: Songs for the Storm to Come’ at HOME

Simal Rafique

Writer Simal Rafique reflects on Songs for the Storm to Come: a two-part immersive multimedia installation about global warming by Greek-British artist Mikhail Karikis who is recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, the UK’s largest award for artists. On view at HOME, Manchester until 2 February 2025 and curated by Clarissa Corfe, Creative Producer: Visual Art, the exhibition combats climate fatigue by emphasising the vitality of the activist imagination – in response to official forecasts by climate scientists in the UK.

Shaped in collaboration with sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and SHE, a local community choir for women and non-binary people, Mikhail Karikis’ solo show is a meditation on climate action. It comprises a 12-minute looped film and a series of eight, visually abstract videos streamed on LCD screens. As I walk into the black cube interior of the gallery, female voices – grouped or singular, melodious or dissonant – are heard chanting ‘We are together because’ in booming repetition.

Through talking with Karikis on the afternoon of the launch of the exhibition, I learn that the choir members are participating in the “deep listening” pedagogy of American avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros: a meditative approach which allows people to discuss difficult topics with heightened sensory awareness. Orchestrated by Karikis, these amateur singers express sentiments of solidarity and anger as they imagine alternative solutions to the impending destruction of the planet. Together, SHE mobilise against the inertia of what is now commonly termed climate or apocalyptic fatigue through a variation of exercises, for example, breath exercises, vocalising, repetition and listening. They pose the questions: is another future possible, and what might it look like?

‘Songs for the Storm to Come’ starts with a tête-à-tête about the predicted transformation of Britain’s topography by the year 2050. Two choir members examine maps of London and the North of England which are shown half-deluged by the continual rising of sea levels, forming massive floodplains and new archipelagos of displacement. Most shocking is the realisation that millions of people in London alone will have to relocate to less flood-prone areas. To comprehend the peril, the dialogue is spliced through with tenebrous shots of women sprinting back and forth in a state of asphyxiation. Here, group breathing exercises become a potent demonstration of our existential dependence on the environment to maintain human life, a fact perhaps underwritten by the solipsist denial of the Anthropocene. Although sea levels are expected to continue rising past 2100, our focus on the year 2050 is crucial given the UK’s legal commitment to meet ‘net zero’ (reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 100% from 1990) by that deadline.

Also incorporated in the film are group readings of The Universal Right to Breathe by Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe and Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Ailton Krenak, the Brazilian Indigenous movement leader. These texts arguably form the intellectual core of Karikis’ climate intervention and are placed accordingly on a bookshelf at the front of the exhibition space for audience perusal. In the first essay from 2020, Achille Mbembe predicts the geopolitical aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and reminds readers that ‘before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation’ – the suffocation of colonial extraction, slavery and environmental racism. Breathing in particular is understood by Mbembe beyond its purely biological aspect; it becomes a commonality and ‘originary right to existence on earth’ shared with humans and other earthly inhabitants, as one of Karikis’ choir singers reads aloud. (1)

Ailton Krenak argues the contrary; in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World he maintains that COVID-19 discriminates against humanity due to the way that human societies operate and that Nature, poles apart from us and our artificial world, ‘isn’t killing birds, bears, or any other creature.’ Krenak reports: ‘There’s a lot more to Earth than us, and biodiversity doesn’t seem to be missing us at all.’ (2) A quick Google search reveals that ironically nature was thriving during UK lockdowns since air, water and noise pollution data in major cities (including Manchester, Birmingham and London), dropped significantly.

In ‘Songs for the Storm to Come’ however, the human remains capable of organising and directing climate policy discussions before it becomes too late to breathe. Decision-making and imagination are of recurring importance in Mikhail Karikis’ practice. In 2014 for instance, he invited forty-five children from a post-industrial Italian village called Larderello to play a boardgame about the implementation of automated and remote-control technologies in the village’s local power plant. In response to the massive upsurge in unemployment rates and the depopulation of Larderello, the project empowered the abandoned children to generate ideas and alter the course of events on a microcosmic level. Ultimately, Children of Unquiet places hope in future generations whose decision-making processes may not be guided by corporate greed and the prioritisation of profit over humanity, an optimism that endures in Karikis’ current show about the climate crisis.

A singer condenses the intellectualism of the film’s reading club: ‘You don’t have to be ecological because you are ecological’ and the presence of a mother cradling her baby resonates as a signifier of a future tense (an unexpected addition to the group, Karikis says, but one which seems natural). The film also alludes to the pivotal role of women’s bodies in creating and nurturing life on our planet against the patriarchal and masculinist logic of capitalism. Perhaps Karikis’ climate activism builds upon the traditions of ecofeminist theory and its contemporary revival, first coined by the writer Francois d’Eaubonne in 1974 to denote how the oppression of women intertwines with the degradation of the environment? If so, the inclusion of transgender and non-binary persons in the community choir moves away from the cliché of a gendered or essentialist conception of ‘Mother’ Nature. The chorus ‘We are together because’ expresses this with renewed vigour, collapsing into a crescendo of clapping, foot-stomping and a tambourine before the film loops over again.

Adjacently, the second part of the exhibition is a mosaic of eight videos spread across the gallery floor. A product of teamwork with sound researchers, Songs for the Storm to Come: “together we can move mountains” applies the vibrational frequencies of the film’s voices to materials such as cornstarch, water and sand through cymatics: the study of how sound waves can be made visible, derived from the Ancient Greek κῦμα (‘wave’). Through the process, Karikis converts a cacophony of angry voices into kinetic energy, rendering it visible. In patterns of swirling blues and orange glitter, materials are magnified to appear like the rugged textures of  rocks and minerals, supposedly a reference to the potentiality of climate action to “move mountains” – starting from the minutiae of individual protest and veering towards the power of collective organisation.

In fact, the title recalls a statement from the film: ‘In a single day humans move more Earth than all natural forces combined move in a year. Together we can move mountains.’ Is this an example of anthropocentrism, an approach to ethical decision-making that centres the value of the human being over the environment? Or perhaps it is an admission that we, human beings, have more individual agency than we might realise, that it is still possible to create changes together whilst cherishing the intrinsic value of nature. ‘Songs for the Storm to Come’ waxes lyrical about the hope of a different future; its deep listening chorus lingers in your head a long time after you leave the show, forcing audiences to confront a future that was once unthinkable.

Footnotes

1. Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe (Translated by Carolyn Shread), Winter 2021, Critical Inquiry 47:S2.

2. Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, 2020.