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Memories of an Asteroid

Date
12 October 2021
Place
Mar del Plata, Argentina
Memories of an Asteroid

Toward a communal geosonology

“This is what draws my imagination: hearing the thing that centers all insurrectional activity, a community of gestation.” — Brandon LaBelle

In 1998, geologist Marcelo Zárate completed a substantial piece of research: 3.3 million years ago, a meteorite impact roughly 1 km in diameter struck the Los Acantilados and Chapadmalal area (south of Mar del Plata), estimated to have affected the Earth’s climate as a whole and much of the region’s fauna. Following this research, NASA carried out a 2019 field study in the area, led by Zárate, in search of millennia-old sediments (resonances). This event gave rise to various mythic-popular narratives around the asteroid. Memories of an Asteroid sits precisely at the heart of these questions and the popular perceptions they awaken.

The fascination of the millennial sound

If we assume that a sound is a force capable of extracting knowledge from the tangle of physical contact: what does a sound bring us when it occupies a place in our imagination, our illusions, our chaos? Jane Bennet proposes a framework for understanding how human agency is bound up with “inhuman evidences” ranging from the most material properties to the most dynamic, cosmological forces. The sound of a meteorite, and the trail of its echo, is made up in large part of an enormous material action — but also of the transcendental projections we humans cast onto that ontological mass.

We want to lay claim to the meteorite’s sound: the capacity to transform our surroundings through the greatest and the smallest vibration, and through the listening that links the millennial and future flow of a sound. What we’re after is the emergence of a sound — and therefore of a music — that arises in the narrow pass of the cosmos’s sovereign, boiling noise, attending to the memory and imagination in which those sounds unfold.

Invitation

Negra40 invites music and sound creators to submit their work, seeking to compose an open, experimental dialogue on the underlying memories of an impact that, in some way, composes us and that we take part in.

Submissions were received from October 12 to November 15, 2021.

Publication and panel discussion

We presented the participating music and sound pieces on an online platform, with additional information on the artists. We also organized a series of videoconference talks with figures from geology, paleontology, music and philosophy, to discuss the implications of asteroids in the popular sonic imagination.

Download the program (PDF)

Participating pieces

Memories of an Asteroid