The project developed from 2023 onward, following the research of Aesthetic Resonances from 2012 onward. This work and works on mariamman.net are protected by international copyright laws. This page is not optimized for mobile viewing. Please refer to the embedded PDF or view this page on a computer. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com
“Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.” — Thomas Sowell
The Earth Sings to Us is an imaginary history of a breathing earth, developing through researching Pozzolana (Roman Concrete) & the Phlegraean Fields. The underscoring idea of Geological Empathy in the Earth Sings to Us aims to share artworks with humanity to cultivate a relationship with nature between society and built environments. The concept of Geological Empathy aims to free the mind from ideals and follow observable reality to lead to deeper understandings. Instead of the domination of nature and valorisation of particular histories, the research and artworks aim to open up often discarded structures, such as the way donkeys roam a landscape and ways forms become over time.
Solutions to humanity’s challenges, now and in the future, can be found by carefully examining history. In my artistic research I study origins, patterns in nature, and distances in viewing, while working on the poetics of space to develop relationships in composition. These visual and installation artworks have been described as ‘sublime timescapes’ and ‘aesthetic resonances’ motivated by the desire to cultivate and preserve Geological Empathy. Studying magnetic resonances stored in the earth led to finding gaps in human history filled with invented, hypothetical stories. The artworks in And The Earth Sings to Us positions humanity, instead of the gods/creators of an algorithmic fate, but as students and stewards of life on earth.
OBSERVATIONS ON WAYS sALTWATER FORTIFIES EARTHEN ASH, DONKEYS, AND RABBITS
Looking at ways the imaginary realm becomes real, recovering the wisdom in Roman concrete serves as a multi-layered metaphor, by studying enduring forces. The truly beautiful can be evaluated as that which withstands time. The work could potentially reside in the framework of visual art, multi-media and performance art, and land-art “mark making” viewable by air, a sculpture significant to praxis o contemporary symbology (potential referenced by monoliths such as Easter Island), a mosaic or façade pigmented with relevant meaningful design, an installation by applied use of photogrammetry, pattern development, and/or displaying the results of ongoing research the study of nuanced differences in environmental interactivity between the chemistry. By studying and working with the ways pozzolana affords spacial, visual, acoustical, and design purpose, I can consider the ways water, as the central force of life, and breathing of the earth through tectonic movements and radiation prevails, at least until Earth’s next biggest the next impact. Therefore, the study of forces must be considered related to harmony and dominance through reverence for the past to apply deeper understanding and grace toward the future.
Artistic research of Pozzolana serves as a fact-based source of discernment. Researching Roman Concrete throughout history and site-specific studies will be used to inform the development of artwork fusing tradition and technology. The poetic and metaphorical understandings arising from the anthropological and anthropogenic Roman Concrete research involves fundamental forces of life elements, in particular water, earth, and air to develop upon the 25+ years multidisciplinary praxis involving land-art, analogue photography, imaging, dance, sculpture, textile, and multimedia installation. Drawing upon my longstanding interests in technology, geology, water, creating in harmony with nature through built environments, the rheology of the earth over time and ingenious use of earth sediment serve as significance to establishing knowledge and the discernment between intelligence and hapless disregard. By taking into account design longevity, including the endurance of 8, 5 to 13 meters depth studies of underwater sites, I can apply my background in interior architecture, photography, performance, and the concept of the Eternal fore-fronting biological research relative to transitions in built environments, and narratives of life on earth with attention to magnetic resonances stored in stones leading to filling in the gaps in our understanding of earth’s history relative to human activity. For example, the Berkeley Lab News Center suggests Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions (lbl.gov). The resulting artwork’s conceptual focus will look into notions enduring the test of time to improve sustainability and healthy ecological goals.
Roman Concrete interests me personally due to the way it becomes over time. When in contact with seawater, the form and structure of Roman concrete becomes more stable. The opposite occurs for Modern Concrete, eroding over time with prolonged exposure to seawater. This is a site of precise, material reality that can be related to philosophy in practice. Building metaphors and myths rooted in reality is of critical importance in contemporaneous technocracy for examining and revealing faulty logic. “Young” Roman Concrete needs time to develop strength from seawater and the elements and was deemed to not have the compressive strength to handle modern use. The folly in the logic is revealed in the application of Modern Concrete withering in time with cracking requiring continual structural maintenance to be preserved, such as in Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian statue in Oregon, Illinois. The material distinctions between Roman and Modern Concrete are also to be looked at through formal structural research. For example, the Nuclear Generating Station (Byron, Illinois) cooling towers. FERMILAB (DeKalb, Illinois), and CERN, and a great number of commercial, industrial, architectural, transportation, civil engineering, resource and waste methods to be researched.
My personal ethos is that facts generate healthier creations than ideas alone, and therefore have rooted my multidisciplinary artistic practice in ongoing skill development in visual arts and design, photography (analogue/darkroom/digital), installations, music, writing and poetry, sculpture (clay, stone, mixed media materials). My educational background involves interior architecture, communications, social psychology, personal study of human behavior and biology, rooted in my upbringing near forests, prairie preserves, nuclear power generation, alongside ongoing interests in technology, geology, archeology, architecture and built environments. The study of Roman Concrete aligns with the way water and earth materials interact. The fundamental concepts of properly understanding nature, in my eyes, become metaphorically apparent in social constructions. In this way, the effects and actuality of construction may offer beneficial cultural relational activity between the Nordics, Italy, and the Americas, with the potential to extend throughout Asia and Europe. Additional partnerships can be considered, such as the Enel Foundation, Norges Geologiske Undersøkelse and other Geoscience organisations.
Pozzolana (working title) aims to look at knowing as a concretization of intuition, pursued and developed to recover lost knowledge, to then examine ways of introducing meaning into the public through art and cultural work. Publishing research, photographs and records from site-specific investigations into the caves, cisterns, and the potential of transversing the Appian Way can generate an ongoing artistic production related to Roman Concrete by creating images (still and moving), sound and performance with dance and vocalisation. These proposals are based on my artistic work influenced by Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Kimsooja, Jennifer Steinkamp, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Gerhard Richter, Tricia Brown, among others in music, dance, and architecture.
THE DONKEY AND THE RABBIT
The study of origins is an important aspect of my work and research. The Three Hares, paintings in the Mogao Caves, near Dunhuang, are occurring in Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish cultures. Following theological curiosity spawned by wanting to understand how peace and prosperity can be generated from a secular sacred space led me to Tim Ingold’s book: Making. Following the way of animals and ways humans think instead of understand the behavior is focused in this research on looking at Donkey’s and Rabbits. Images on this page were found on the internet. If the images belong to you, please write to mariammanart@icloud.com for removal or to make usage/rights agreements. Support the research and artwork via LE LAPIN
Bibliography (to be continued, copyright remains with the publications)
Marie D. Jackson, Research at Utah: Geology and Geophysics
Excerpt from “Miracle Materials Episode 1: From Concrete to Clay” from Advanced Light Source on Vimeo.
The Fate of Volcanic Ash: Premature or Delayed Sedimentation? Supplementary Information (Nature Communications)
The Society of Rheology: Roman Concrete study
Surtsy Volcano Research, University of Utah
2018 Jackson ACERS Feature Jun-Jul18
2014 AJA Program Abstracts Surtsey
Chemistry of coal combustion products (wiki)
AHO, Toxic Beauty: Visualizing and Transposing the Waste Landscape of Langøya by Jhu Yin Hong
Magnetic Resonance Research Project
(Possuolana, Tufa/Tuff)
Sinuessa lantica città scomparsa vicino Mondragone, 2020, Federico Quagliuolo
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
A 2,000-year-old Roman Concrete dam Aragon helped to prevent flooding in a nearby town in Spain
Special thanks to Francesco Bentivegna; Vincenzo Capicchiano, Architect; Marie D. Jackson, PhD.
Previous works, editorial, photography of Roman Concrete in Rome and Pozzuoli, additional thoughts:
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The Field’s Project, 1999
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 Lorado Taft Unveiling |
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| Letters to a Young Poet….Rome 29 Ottobre 1903…My dear Sir, your letter of 29 august reached me in Florence and only now – two months on – do I give you news of it. Forgive me this delay, but I prefer not to write letters when I’m traveling because letter-writing requires more of me than just the basic wherewithal: some quiet and time on my own and moment when I feel relatively at home. We arrive in Rome about six weeks ago, at a time when it was still the empty, hot city, the Rome supposedly ridden with fevers, and this circumstance together with other practical difficulties to do with settling in, meant that the unrest surrounding us went on and on and the foreignness of the place lay on us with the weight of homelessness. On top of that you have to remember that Rome (if one is not yet acquainted with it) seems oppressively sad when on first arrives: the lifeless and drear museum-atmosphere it breathes, the abundance of fragments of the past (on which a tiny present nourishes itself) that have been fetched out of the ground and laboriously maintained, the unspeakable excess of esteem, nourished by academics and philologists with the help of run-of-the-mill tourists, given to all these disfigured and spoilt objects which after all are basically nothing more than accidental vestiges of another age and of a life that is not our own and is not meant to be. At last, after weeks of daily fending off, you get your bearings back, and somewhat dazed you tell yourself: No, there is not more beauty here than elswhere, and all these objects which generation after generation have continued to admire, which in expert hands have mended and restored, they mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere. Infinitely lively waters go over the old aqueducts into the city and on the many square dance over bowls of white stone and fill broad capricious basins and murmur all day and raise their murmur into the night, which is vast and starry and soft with winds. And there are gardens here, unforgettable avenues and flights of steps, steps conceived by Michelangelo, steps built to resemble cascades of flowing water – giving birth to step after broad step like wave after wave as they descend the incline. With the help of such impressions you regain your composure, win your way back out of the demands of the talking and chattering multitude (how voluble it is!), and you slowly learn to recognize the very few things in which something everlasting can be felt, something you can love, something solitary in which you can take part in silence. I’m still living in the city, on the Capitol, not far from the finest equestrian statue that has come down to us from Roman art – that of Marcus Aurelius. But in a few weeks I shall be moving into a quiet, simple room, an old summer-house lost in the depths of a great park, hidden away from the city with its noise and its inconsequentiality. I’ll live there for the whole winter and take pleasure in the great stillness from which I expect the gift of good and productive hours…From there, where I shall feel more at home, I’ll write you a longer letter in which I’ll also have something to say about your writing. Today I must just mention (and it was perhaps wrong of me not to have done so before) that the book you announced in your letter (which you said contained piece by you) has not arrived here. Has it been sent back to you, perhaps from Worpswede? (For: packets cannot be forwarded abroad.) This is the best explanation, which it would be nice to have confirmed. I hope it has not gone astray, which given the Italian postal service cannot be ruled out – alas. I should have been glad to receive the book (as with everything that gives some sign of you); and any verse you have written since I shall always (if you entrust me with it) read reread and take in as well and as completely as I can. With good wishes and greetings, Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke. | 
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Vocalization in Vigeland’s Mausoleum
That which is often right in front of us becomes an eloquent and sustainable generator. As the way the ruins of Rome stand with us today, often overlooked through cultural tourism, a deeper dive through history and cultivating an understanding of the distinction and nuance of the fact of its existence can result in enduring (sustainable) decisions for creating art and civil projects.
As a sketch for the sound composition is to resource my background in singing and piano, as well musical colleagues I’ve collaborated with in the past for Stop Bath, La Mer, By Still Waters. I propose creating a soundtrack for a multi-media spacial-experiential exhibition. By translating stories of Roman Concrete, seawater, and earth sites, and the visible human marks on the earth, visible underwater, from space, and certainly throughout time, the resonances can tell stories to inform the future generations to come.
For example, the signals from earth’s magnetic field interacting with the cosmic radiation and solar storms the European Space Agency’s ESA Swarm satellites records can be considered as material to work with sound. This is the way frequencies resonate off long distance, such as the way underwater sea creatures find their way through depths. By tuning into these soundscapes, the voice of the sites and forms made becomes discernible through the aid of research, data analysis, and creating a song. This layer of the potential artistic research outcome is inspired by Sonic Restoration by researchers, Jake M. Robinson, Christian Cando-Dumancela, and Martin F. Breed, at Flinders University. In the way translations of the earth’s electromagnetic force fields protecting the earth sound eery when heard in raw format, the sound of that which can endure time can be exposed. The initial layer of development began during a field research trip to the kobalt caves at Blaafargeverket, in Telemark, Norway, 2018. Further research and inspiration was gathered during the Kjerringøy Land Art residency in 2020, and developing Aesthetic Resonances artistic research project. Invigorating magnetic resonance data with artistic research, utilising Pattern Recognition, spacial-audible understandings of constructive life choices on earth add a layer to the spacial-temporal exhibition. While recognizing unknowns, such as the Devonian period, in contrast to known variables, the research findings aim to create soundscape for viewers to temporally experience a meaningful relationship with ephemeral messages to aid humanity in re-imagining beautiful and benevolent futures.
Magnetic Signals Battle With a Solar Storm
2006, Ernst Reijseger, Album: Requiem for a Dying Planet (Music for Two Films by Werner Herzog: The White Diamond and the Wild Blue Yonder)
Recorded at Yellow Cab Studios, Paris, France, June 12,13, 2004
Bauer Studios Ludwigsburg, October 10, 2004
Fluxx Tonnstudio, Münich, March 12, 2006
Mola Sylla, vocals, m’bira, xalam
Voches de Sardinna: Tenore e cuncordu de Orosei:
Patricio Mura, voche
Gianluca Frau, voche e contra
Mario Siotto, bassu
Piero Pala, voche e mesovoche
Massimo Roych, voche e mezzovoche
A result of a fortuitous collaboration between German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Dutch avant-garde cellist Ernst Reijseger, Requiem for a Dying Planet is an autonomous album created from score recordings, remixed by Reijseger and producer Stefan Winter, of the Herzog films The Wild Blue Yonger and The White Diamond. Combining Reijseger’s formidable skills in the grey regions between jazz, improvised, and chamber music, with the mesmerizing vocal talents of Senegalese singer Mola Sylla and Sardinian vocal choir Voches de Sardinna, the album covers an extraordinarily wide range of moods and textures, from vaguely liturgical atmospheres to threatening drones to delicate percussive vignettes–eliciting a mysterious aura contemplative of planet Earth’s hereafter.
Lyrics:
Thank you, Lord (Dank sei Dir, Herr)
Thank you, Lord (Dank sei Dir, Herr)
You have led your people with you (Du hast Dein Volk mit Dir geführt)
Israel across the sea (Israel hindurch das Meer)
It passed through like a herd (Wie eine Herde zog es hindurch)
Lord, your hand protected it (Herr Deine Hand schützte es)
In your goodness you gave him salvation (In Deiner Güte gabst Du ihm Heil)
Thank you, Lord (Dank sei Dir, Herr)
Thank you, Lord (Dank sei Dir, Herr)
You have led your people with you (Du hast Dein Volk mit Dir geführt)
Israel across the sea (Israel hindurch das Meer)
Potential Software Resources For Visualizations
Goldspot LithoLens, Datarock, Driver AI, Spacial, OreFox, RadiXplore
Images of Norwegian Geological Formations by Mari Amman, including Blaafarageværket (Telemark), Trøndelag, Oslo, Lofoten Regions
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