Planetarische Bauern

In his latest essay film, Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, artist Liu Chuang (born 1978 in Hubei Province, now based in Beijing, China), brings together two seemingly disparate references in the title: an alkaline metal best known for its use in smartphone batteries, and a once-forbidden musical form composed of two or more independent melodies. After his widely exhibited Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), Chuang continues to interlace representations of the Earth with historical artefacts of colonial extraction, science fiction literature, popular cinema, and perspectives drawing on both economic and ethnomusicological theories. The link between the control of water and hegemonic power mirrors the entanglement of ecology and economics, as polyphonic singing is performed by Lithuanian folk singers and Mbuti women from the Congo. Fears of extinction and threats to diversity intertwine, culminating in the pressing question: How and where will humans exercise their polyphonic potential?