Permian Basin (Edi's House): Phil Peters
Permian Basin (Edi’s House)
11:30 am to 8 pm, Wednesday, June 26, 2019
4915 Holt Street, Bellaire, TX 77401
For this Mud + Blue collaboration, artist Phil Peters brings a durational audio recording made at an oil drilling site in the Permian Basin to the home of artist Edi Shreeve in Bellaire. Flooded by Hurricane Harvey, the house remains in its post-storm state, even as its neighboring structures are torn down and rebuilt. Understood together, the recording and the home suggest the imbalances we live with, and the knowledge we take from the earth, as understood through sound. Together, we bid goodbye to a home that Shreeve and her family occupied for more than forty years. We understand this to be an event of mourning and listening, of quiet reflection and togetherness, a moment to consider the enormous differences between geologic and human time. Visitors are invited to drop by and stay as long as they would like during the run of the one-day listening. While RSVP is not required, it is appreciated: ella@lauraagosto.com.
Peters writes, “These sounds come from the reverberations of the energy industry surrounding Midland and Odessa. While visiting one of the sites in 2018, I planted two DIY subterranean microphones in the ground. What I heard were the ultra-low frequency reverberations of metal carbide bits grinding against 250 million year-old rock. This permian layer, which gives the region its name, contains a record of the largest mass extinction in the history of the earth. Geologists have shown that the atmosphere experienced a rapid rise in carbon dioxide, which resulted in global warming, followed by catastrophic climate change; an uncanny prehistoric echo of our present and near future. The recordings bring into proximity two scales of time: the geologic and biologic, expressing them not as two separate experiences, but as part of one continuum.”
“This deep geologic audio evokes the organic: coursing blood, a beating heart, steady breath. However, it belongs to a system so large as to be indifferent to organic needs. The shape is striated, like layers of sediment. In listening, we are invited to sift through the acoustic strata, sinking into an alternate space. There is an anxiety here in the deepest layers of the infrasonic. It stems from cataclysm and the latent threat of eruptive volcanoes and fractured earth, of burial but also a distant memory of birth. These recordings come from a place inaccessible and inhospitable to our bodies, and in this way they are searching. Instead of looking up and out as we might look at the sky or at the sea, the recordings look down and in. Listening to the earth becomes a kind of introspective time travel, we hear deep echos of the geologic past. In searching this deep we are also trying to see ahead. This project creates a new space, one in which we look to the resonance of rocks as soothsayers. The site of listening becomes, like an oracle, a place to ask questions even as we struggle to divine the answers.”
Mud + Blue is a curatorial project by Laura August, supported by the IDEA Fund.