Even though I knew Lungs of the Earth was going to be a sound-based exhibit, I was still surprised when I walked into Loeb Studio. There was nothing on the walls, and for a while I just stood by the door peering around for something to look at.
The only visuals were four die-cut paper squares hanging in the centre of the room, each with a different scene from the Amazon jungle. Dim lights shone through the gaps and created shadows on the wall — a semblance of a semblance of a real rainforest 8,000 kilometres away. Everything else was sound, pouring from the ceiling and rumbling under the floor.
While the auditory aspect was completely immersive — rich soundscapes of rushing water and screaming birds, fire sweeping trees away and thunder booming loud enough to make me flinch — there was no point during Lungs of the Earth where I felt like I was really in the Amazon rainforest.
According to lead artist Alyssa Martens, the distance was part of the process. Having grown up in Sao Paulo, Martens came to environmental advocacy as an urbanite; she moved to Abbotsford as a teenager but affectionately describes Sao Paulo as the city she “fell in love with as a child.” In 2019, massive forest fires in the Amazon created so much smoke they turned the sky black all over Brazil, an experience Martens said “really sparked something for me at the beginning of the project, and got me thinking about how these places that we think are separate aren’t.”
One of my favourite details from the soundscape was the fact that layered into the audios were recordings from Canadian landscapes. The first part of the poem cycle, “Water” by Patrizia Longhitano is read over the rushing sounds of a river in Quebec. Bird calls native to Brazil emerge — the piha, cacique and tinamou — and the poetry is beautiful and stirring: “When I memorize the ripples of the water I’ll become a woman, forgetting I was once a fish.”
Longhitano’s poem ends as a forest fire sparks and begins to roar. Later in the lobby, I was shocked to discover that the fire recordings were actually taken near where I grew up in the Northwest Territories. Like Martens said, these places we think are separate really aren’t. Smoke and fire can travel very, very far. So can the cry of piha birds — the loudest birds on the planet, which can only be found in the most protected parts of South American rainforests.
“Air,” the third poem in the cycle, began with the echoing scream of a piha. During our interview, Martens characterized the piha as “quite averse to disaster,” and described her interest in placing the bird “within this ecological dystopia where she isn’t hiding, she’s actually speaking.”
It’s hard to know what the piha would say if she could speak to us like Martens imagines. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe her loud call would be a kind of rallying cry, but I don’t think that’s what I heard. Instead, Lungs of the Earth called me to feel for faraway things that I can’t touch or see, but can temporarily hear thanks to Martens and her team. “It’s the feeling of memory,” Martens said, and I agree. Not totally imaginary, but not quite real — connecting you to some other place and time.
The final poem, “Earth,” ends in desolation, but then the cycle starts all over with “Water,” and the amalgam of Canadian and Brazilian river sounds come together again. It would be trite to reduce this cycle to a kind of flat message of hope and optimism — few genuinely invested in environmentalism would be quick to describe themselves as “optimistic” — but I liked something Martens said to me, which is that she hopes her project “allows you to think about what might be there.”
This is one alternative way to understand memory, apart from it being a kind of functional process that helps us release lost objects. What if memory were instead a lens of possibility? A ‘something else was here once’ that reminds you something else could emerge again. Something different, but still something.
Lungs of the Earth will be digitally accessible to UBC students until December 31. Access it here.
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