A Nocturnal Assembly
A Nocturnal Assembly is a one night audio-visual installation conceived by artists Neal White and Tina O’Connell. As an event, the artists, the audience, and the wider speakers of Soil Assembly make way for the voices of other living species to be heard.
A Nocturnal Assembly is a temporal event, starting before dusk, where sounds and images loop, connecting day and night.
In this project, Soil Assembly starts to explore how it can welcome multi-species voices, in terms of knowledge, attunement, justice and stewardship. The project was developed following the artists own investigations into nocturnal environments. It was developed through extensive dialogue and discussions with other international artists, organisers and activists participating in Soil Assembly, engaged in areas such as deep listening.
A Nocturnal Assembly draws our attention to the human pollution flooding into a temporal zone, that is the sanctuary of other life-worlds. In foregrounding other species voices, the project not only highlights the rich nature of nocturnal biodiversity, but draws attention to ‘anthropogenic noise’, including sound and light, that now threaten these nocturnal ecologies. Artistic forms are used to sense the uncanny nature of these other realities that we live alongside at night, realities that many in western contemporary society no longer perceive, acknowledge, or have just simply forgotten.
The installation takes form through moving images from nocturnal fieldwork made by Neal White and Tina O’Connell shot over the last three years in Amsterdam, UK and India. The Night Club, a group of artists whose shared interests in deep listening and ecology are connected to the Soil Assembly, events and workshops (list of artists to be confirmed) provide elements of the soundscape. In this respect, the collective activity of The Night Club situates humans amongst a multitude of species and of voices of local nocturnal ecologies.