Ear to the Ground: Golden Monolith & Black Monolith (excerpt)
Ulrika Sparre

A screening of the full film will be held between 1st & 8th October.

To delve deeply: across Ulrika Sparre’s life as an artist, listening was both method and ethical stance. In attending to what is usually imperceptible, she translated deep temporal traces locked in the more-than-human into sensory experience. In her series Ear to the Ground, soundings became testimonies.

Golden Monolith & Black Monolith stages an existential dialogue between Sparre’s practice of attentive listening and Alberto Giacometti’s memories of his birth village of Stampa. For Giacometti, Stampa – a cluster of impressive granite peaks in the Val Bregaglia – was an enchanted world; he remembered, as a child, a single enormous stone at the mouth of a cave, a “golden monolith” he would huddle beneath. Sparre carries that memory into the present. Working in Stampa and in response to Szymborska’s Conversation with a Stone, she deployed contact microphones to record the barely audible sounds of the monoliths – stone formations shaped by weather, geology, and human history, and plausibly among the first influences for Giacometti’s sculptural work. The film explores varying degrees of proximity – intimacies and distances that determine how we perceive non-human presence.

The film weaves Sparre’s field recordings, Szymborska’s poetic refusal of possession, and Giacometti’s reverie into a contemporary meditation on endurance, humility, and the responsibility of attention. To listen well is itself a form of progressive activism.