Video installation

The starting point of Hear her calendar system a year of thirteen months is the photograph of a sycamore fig tree (Ficus sycomorus) taken by Bianca Baldi’s grandfather in Ambo, west of Addis Ababa, in 1939 during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Proceeding from this image, the installation – which consists of video and a specially composed choral work by Gabi Motuba – creates a dense network of personal memories, colonial history and ecological relationships in which private and collective narratives intermingle.

The choral interpretation of Baldi’s poem Sicomoro Centenario allows the tree to speak: as a silent witness, older then wars and imperial ambitions, whose roots and branches weave together time and space. Past, present and possible futures don’t appear as linear, but rather as interconnected rhythms of the sun, moon and seasons. The voices of the choir take up this cyclical movement: they respond to one another, repeat, shift and condense motifs. History thus becomes audible not as a closed narrative but rather as a polyphonic constellation in which fragments, memories and perspectives are constantly realigned.

Ecological relationships come into focus at the same time. Insects, plants and the surrounding landscape emerge as partners of an ongoing exchange. Each fig becomes part of a finely tuned structure of reproduction, passing on and survival. The sycamore thus becomes a node where human and non-human entities, material traces and memories are connected.

The title of the work makes reference to the Ethiopian calendar system, which has thirteen months, and opens up a view of different orders of time. Time doesn’t appear here as a neutral unit of measurement, but rather as a framework shaped by culture and politics which structures perception, memory and action. Calendars give order to the rhythms of life, establish cycles and creates systems of reference within which history is narrated and organised. As the installation links together different rhythms of image, voice and space, an open arrangement of perspectives is created in which ruptures are just as present as continuities and relations.

Baldi combines family traces, global history, intimacy and structural violence. The tree thus becomes a resonance chamber for relational experience: as an archive, symbol and active entity, it shows how different ordering systems become joined beyond time, space and species. The past continues to reverberate, the present can be experienced with all the senses and the future is imagined as a potential network of kinship, responsibility and connection. In Hear her calendar system a year of thirteen months, remembering is not closed off, but rather can be felt as a polyphonic, ongoing process in which forms of belonging, responsibility and resistance can be conceived of anew again and again.

The work was produced by WIELS and supported by the Italian Council programme, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

• Sektion Section: An Incomplete Assembly
• Programm Programme: An Incomplete Assembly