– Listening through the Scars of the Earth, 2023
Research Project, 18minutes 14seconds, Sound Cloud – Ongoing
The Ground Has Ears is a sound art research project that listens to land as a living archive. The project’s point of departure is a quarry site comprising both active and abandoned sections in northern Nigeria using it as a microcosm for understanding extraction and post-extractive landscapes. This project draws from field recordings gathered from the quarry site and engage with it as an entrance into the wider environmental and sonic history of resource extraction around the world.
Extraction leaves deep marks on the land. Blasted rock faces, abandoned pits, collapsed shafts, worker chatter and the hum of machinery form a shared geological and acoustic language. Its carved walls, echo chambers, and stagnant turquoise pools carry the same residues found in extraction zones. The land itself holds memory in the form of scars, reverberations, and shifting of silence.
This project treats the quarry as an acoustic document, a place where the ground speaks. I explore how sound reveals the layers of violence, labour, and transformation that extraction inscribes into the earth. The quarry becomes both witness and participant: it amplifies and transform sound through its natural cavern-like acoustics, producing reflections, delays, and resonances that act like geological memory.
Through sound, the project makes these histories audible, revealing the afterlives of land once used, emptied, and left to recover or decay. It expands from a single recording site into a broader inquiry about memory and the futures of post-extractive landscapes. It also reflects the human dimension of extraction: the rhythms of labour, the informal economies that sustain workers, and the precarious relationship between communities and the land.
