THE EMPEROR’S CANaRY

An audio work emitted through two gramophones, inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo. The first gramophone plays a recording of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the second plays a recording of a person with black lung disease—two sounds that, for the artists, represent crises in our relationship with the environment. This work was originally commissioned and presented by the High Line in New York and later traveled to other venues, including Centre Pompidou Metz. 

For the presentations at the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial and Centre Pompidou, the original parts of the “canary’s song” were joined by the sounds of logging in the UNESCO-protected Bialowieża forest, storytelling in Vilamovian (an obscure Central-European language on the verge of extinction), cries of the Peruvian diving petrel, howls of Chernobyl’s wolves, and a few notes from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. 

This piece is dedicated to Scott Pruitt, the fourteenth Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), nominated by President Donald Trump.