Otoliths, aqueous notes
Artistic Research Lab 24/25 - Casino Display
(2025) Luxembourg/ LU
duration: 3 min
(research text here)
The work is a brief theatrical performance for one audience member at a time, based on the Brazilian tradition of Lambe-Lambe theatre. It imagines the sonorous oscillations which take place between an acoustic atmosphere and spatial proximity through gathered stories about fish otoliths. Otoliths are small, solid calcium carbonate structures, located in a fish’s ear, three times denser than the rest of the fish’s body, and an integral part of its orientation and auditory systems.
‘Otoliths, Aqueous Notes’ explores how the delayed movements and the transits of matter within their aqueous chambers could constitute temporary sonic envelopments, outside the scope of human hearing, and as a form of sonic storytelling. The broader research focuses on how the surfaces of otoliths, and the ways they are extracted, have been translated into tidal predictions, amulets, oceanic datasets, and the archaeological imagination.
In collaboration with Lance Laoyan
Special thanks to the ‘Laboratório de Arqueologia Casa de Pedra’/ the National Museum on Brazil and the MNAHA (Musée national d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’art - Luxembourg)
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‘If while eating a fish you find its otoliths,
you’ll return someday to the place
where the fish was taken from’
‘If turbulent lines are seen in otoliths,
as wave-like mimetic signs
a fisherman better refrain from the sea’
‘A man was buried with hundreds of otoliths,
for the quest and wonder
of archaeological imagination’
I imagine the counting in their hands,
for there were days, places and populations.
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