Nolan Oswald Dennis’s practice recruits the earth, the elements and the cosmos as co-conspirators in re-imagining the world beyond established hegemonies. Guided by African cosmo- and geopoetics, the artist charts a path towards a place where the depth of blackness touches the depths of the earth, thereby bringing alternative conceptions of the planet to the surface. Dennis leads us into the vastness of the sound, where the polyphonic hum of the earth orients us towards a polyvalent conception of the plural worlds (Indigenous, black, queer) that it bears.
Black Earth Calendar and Black Water Station (Mbarara) are assembled from recordings made from a series of open-source seismic sensing arrays located on the African continent (including one in the artist’s studio). This technology detects extremely low-frequency sounds in the earth’s crust, which can be used for geological research, as well as to detect military and seismic activity, volcanic eruptions and tectonic shifts. Like so many scientific apparatuses, infrasound technologies are thoroughly imbricated in militarised violence, with the regime of property, and with an extractivist logic that aims to know the earth so as to take from it. The resulting sound move between seemingly incommensurate scales, harmonising contemporary events in Sudan, Palestine and South Africa with the enormous recesses of geological time.
—Zoë Hopkins
