KAMI NO AIKA
Emilia Haar

Emilia Haar’s KAMI NO AIKA also treats the act of listening as an ethical act, blurring boundaries between myth and science, human and non-human. It draws on Japanese Shinto beliefs – that mountains, rivers, stones and winds are imbued with Kami (nature spirits) – aligning us with these beings, who have become “witnesses to the ongoing estrangement between humankind and nature.”

“With the Kami as our point of reference,” Haar writes, “we begin to hear unfamiliar frequencies that reveal how the world is undergoing change.” The film’s dystopian imagery pairs with this auditory sensitivity, making visible and audible the elegy of the Kami as they look upon human power and disruption.

Haar works with field recordings and percussive vinyl samples to produce minimalistic soundscapes. In KAMI NO AIKA, this might mean layering extreme sounds, low and high in frequency – the crack of melting ice or the groan of shifting rock – into one uncanny soundscape.

Sparre’s Ear to the Ground series uses contact mics to capture each stone’s “inner sounds” – a “secret language” of slow vibrations. Lau Persijn’s Underneath It Flickers (below) treats a Brussels empty lot as alive, asking how to “listen to a space considered empty.” Haar’s film contributes to this deep-listening practice, making the faintest natural voices audible and relaying the notion that consequential changes often lie just beyond perception.