#theoriginoflife

The Contaminated Origin Of Life  Sound piece, 25 min., 2019

This sound piece is part of the show The Heavy Air That Surround Us that presented in Galerie im Turm, Berlin, from the 1st of November 2019 until the 12th of January 2020. This sound piece is a speculative story that talks about oceans, crude oil, plankton, dust and bacteria to speculate with the idea of a cosmic, dark and unknown origin of life on Earth. In this way the narration seeks to investigate the possibility of a non-anthropocentric thinking and phenomenology that could serve as a survival strategy for the future.     

Text: Sonia Fernández Pan and Anaïs Senli Translation: Whitney DeVos Voice: Siegmar Zacharias Sound: Camille Mandoki

At night, when I can’t sleep, I think of the sea. I imagine I’m on a beach, sitting on the sand. I stare at the horizon and listen to the rocking of the waves. It’s curious that the word wave is also used to refer to: feelings -wave of restlessness-; processes of displacement -wave of migrants-; situations of at hostile nature -wave of violence-; or even weather conditions -heatwave. Although there are also words to describe things which exist ambiguously, such as the line separating the sky from the earth. Like the horizon, language opens possibilities–but it closes them off, too.

I’ve always wondered why I’m so drawn to the sea. Perhaps because I was born in a city on the coast, or perhaps because the monotonous sound of the waves acts as a kind of guarantee of the future, a murmur that predicts what’s to come. After this wave comes another one, then another, and so on and so forth. Where does a wave begin and end? Nevertheless the sea can exist even where there is no sea. In inland areas, the sound of cars on the highways so resembles that of the waves that it is possible to hear how oil turns into ocean. Above the asphalt, a stream of black liquid traverses the cars’ circulatory systems until it is converted into gas. In a grey fog. But my attraction to the sea could also be due to something very different, to a promise of emptiness opening up behind the horizon: an anonymous zone lying beyond any known perspective, a way out of the homogenized, androcentric gazes pointing in the same direction. Outside of all meaning, that space is located in a place where what we cannot think or represent projects what’s unknown. Unknown for what or for whom? Can we think beyond us? What does the unknown become, once we get to know it?

With the name Terra Incognita, Westerners referred to a variety of lands unknown to them. This reductionism of the other, of the still-unfamiliar, of immeasurable multiplicity, is still present when we talk about the non-human in relation to the human. The content of the non-human is too immense to measure via the human. Despite the nuances, Man is still the measurement for everything else. With the phrase hic sunt dracones, here there are dragons, cartographers of the past established an imaginary border between the relative comfort of the known and the potential danger of the unknown. I repeat, unknown to them. Now that Terra Incognita extends throughout the universe, the dragons spit light among meteorites and nebulas. The colonial spirit inhabits the exosphere, but also seeps into the earth’s crust.

A little while ago, I read in an article that scientists have found water -with an isotopic mark identical to that of Earth- on the asteroid Itokawa. Apparently, as much as half of our ocean water could have come from the impact of asteroids like this one. Shortly after the formation of our planet, these asteroids collided with Earth’s surface, helping to create its oceans. Is water a defining element of Earth? To what extent does living on a planet give us the right to say it is “ours”? To what extent does living in a territory give us the right to feel it is “ours”?

The first living beings on Earth were tiny and lived without oxygen: prokaryotic bacteria. They transformed the surface of the planet and its atmosphere. They invented all the essential chemical processes for life and, it seems, before them life did not exist. Life where? We tend to think of time in a linear format, setting dates that allow us to identify the beginning and end of something, but what does something happened thousands of years ago mean? Imagine how it would affect a year zero for the origin of life if I told you that an army of microorganisms traveled camouflaged in the cosmic ice of asteroids that crashed into Earth about 4 billion years ago. When and where did life begin? Tardigrades, organisms that are lovers of extreme conditions, are able to hibernate in space. They form part of the chaos of cosmic energy, which most of us would rather ignore.

Bacteria can exchange their genes and combine their bodies with other organisms. Imagine what would happen if we were also able to trade genetic information, and our skin were to stop acting as a border: between the inner and outer, between one’s self and another. Imagine that borders are gateways, the basis of contact and not its interruption. Imagine the Human falls apart completely. And by Human I mean Man: the fiction of the unified subject, autonomous and identifiable to himself. In my body there are millions and millions of bacteria. Our body has more bacteria than cells. Are we human communities of bacteria? Are we humans a symbiotic intertwining of different zones of life employing the same body? Are we simply a means for life itself to exist?

I open the curtain by the window. The light that enters from outside allows me to see an infinitude of dust particles drifting through the air in my room. I open my hand and close it tightly, trying to grab some of these particles. But the dust always escapes. It doesn’t let itself get caught. It occurs to me that one of the benefits of not having a concrete form is the ability to continually exceed limits. Even the limits of meaning. Because dust is no-thing and yet nonetheless it is everywhere. It travels through the universe, millions of light years from this room, but it also travels the interior of my body. We are stardust. If I were able to analyze each of these particles surrounding me, what kind of information would they reveal? Perhaps they are a stream of information carrying data from the entire solar system to my room. Dust is alien matter that seeks contact with all bodies. Its particles mix with any kind of component and any sort of fluid, penetrating them as bacterial spores. They can reside in many places, from tissues to soils, plants or food. They are strata of multiplicities disguised, entities in transit with the thirst of the dry to fuse with the wet. They are a milky way of floating bodies, as is plankton traveling through the ocean, painting stains of fluorescent blue. Aquatic flowers covering huge spans of distance. Paradoxically, plankton is only visible from a distance of many kilometers away, from space. Although we tend to think of it in the ocean depths, plankton is closely linked to the atmosphere. It’s a nomadic superorganism that produces fifty percent of the air we breathe. When it dies, plankton is buried at the sea floor. Like dust, it mixes with other organic materials and sediments. The result of this thousand-year process of decomposition and putrefaction is what we call oil. A death that is the origin of another life that, in turn, is the origin of other deaths. Without plankton there is no oxygen, and without oil there is no capitalism. Capitalism reminds me of dust, infiltrating all places and inside all bodies.

For a moment, I imagine capitalism takes form as a mythological animal with seemingly-unstoppable strength. This animal, which changes form constantly and survives as a parasite inside other bodies, is thirsty. It drinks oil and, upon exhaling, pollutes the waters and the life they contain. I could blame the oil, that corrupt substance, that strategic lubricant and vehicle of this economic system which generates vermicular lines. I imagine a huge worm digging tunnels and wells. No matter functions as a border. The larvae burrow through the earth’s skin, migrating in the connective tissues, crust and strata, feeding on necrotic solids and surfaces. I imagine the sinuous movement of these larvae. They infest the solid part of Earth, making it unavoidably viscous. They make their way to the surface. Larvae also need to breathe, they also need oxygen. They press their headless tails against the surface for air. But, by then, there is no oxygen left. All of the plankton has turned to oil. The deep future and the deep past collectively dwell in the same place. A temporary disagreement. What has already happened is merged with that which could happen.

It’s said that observing a black tide is like witnessing a slow motion process. After one wave comes another, and then another, and another, until the notion of the wave almost disappears completely. Similarly, words lose their meaning when we repeat them over and over again. Spore, spore, spore, spore … Oil bursts forth like an archaic flow, forming threads, strands, and filigrees, thinning out and then thickening and then folding in on themselves, swelling in the black undulated mass. It behaves like a black hole. I try to resist the symbolic meanings behind the words that come to mind. Black, dark, empty. Is it possible to use words without their usage dragging along all the ideology they contain? Let me go back to oil. On Earth, a formless and anonymous fabric appears. It is the flesh that contaminates the contaminated origin of life, revealing a materiality much earlier than the human species, long before life on this planet. Circumstances that transcend our understanding have the ability to leave us speechless, without language, without tools to face the absence of satisfactory explanations. Why should everything have to be explained by us? And yet, it is this moment of uncertainty which allows the horizon to appear again. But this time it is not an imaginary line separating the sky from the sea, but a movement, an intuition, a sensation that’s turned into a wave, a wave in which one possibility merges with another without ever solidifying or acquiring a recognizable form. The rational is confused with the visceral. Thought becomes viscous. I get the feeling language is made of saliva and flesh.

I am barefoot on a beach. I near the shore and feel the waves crash against my ankles. It tickles. My body also turns to shore. In the distance, the horizon keeps its promise that it really exists, even if I’ll never be able to touch it. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, on the other side of the Milky Way, millions of objects the size of an asteroid carry life. They are a band of cosmic shipwrecks. Some of these objects are as large -or as small- as Earth. I rock back and forth and notice how my feet are buried in the shore, now above my ankles. Water splashes at my knees. More than half of my body is water. Perhaps the sand on this beach is a fossil from one of those asteroids that collided with the Earth millions of years ago, into its still-lifeless environment. The bacteria come into contact with water, little by little becoming fluorescent. From outer space, it’s possible to see a stain advancing steadily from the ocean to the earth’s surface, transforming into an iridescent membrane. An energy field invading the atmosphere. A new entity appears, an incorporeal ecosystem living in symbiosis with the alterity it comes to engender. Life appears after life.