Mataró (Catalonia) and Cagliari (Sardinia). Moon Ribas and Quim Girón are the creators of SOTA TERRA. Their joint creations reflect the desire to unite their particular disciplines, the dance and cyborg world of the former, and the contemporary circus of the latter, making them dialogue with current technology and the most primitive natural aspects.
Technology as a means of communicating with nature and trying to understand it is the preface of this proposal: each viewer is given a headlight and a bracelet connected to the earthquake network that vibrates every time one occurs. The headlamps worn by each spectator are the only lighting of the show. There are no spotlights other than the light of the observers. As a spectator, you have absolute power over the place you look at. You can light up the stage, the sides, the ceiling, even the stalls. As a speleologist, it is in your hands to carry out the research route you want to carry out during the show. Now more than ever, this show cannot be seen if there is no one to watch it. The Buddhist question of "if a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one sees it, does it make a noise?" comes into full force here.
On stage, only a layer of earth covering the entire ground, accompanied by the singing of cicadas. The choice is not accidental: cicadas are small animals that can spend up to seventeen years underground in a lethargic state and, when the heat arrives and the time they consider has elapsed, they are reborn and spend the whole summer singing. Those squeaks that we hear in the Mediterranean forests during the summer days may have been peacefully silent for seventeen years in the telluric darkness and humidity. And a prophetic voice, the only intelligible words in the whole show, are those of Ubaldo Sanna, an inhabitant of Fluminimaggiore (a small village 80 kilometers from Cagliari), who, at the age of seventeen, perhaps between the burial and rebirth of a cicada, discovered a cave and, since then, for 50 years, has gone practically every day of his life.
A man who has lived much of his existence underground and who equates those years to the millimeters of growth of stalactites: one millimeter is equivalent to ten years of human life, ten complete revolutions of the Earth around the Sun. Sanna looks like something out of Werner Herzog's documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Like Chauvet Cave, the Su Mannau Caves caught up with him and never let him go. His instinct has definitively overcome his intellect.
The discovery of another world at hand, a place where society has not been able to settle or wreak havoc, disturbs and undeterred or forever expels those who discover it. Like Socrates in Plato's Cave, both Chauvet's scientists and Sanna himself explain how time stands still inside the cave, underground, in the arteries of our planet. Plato tries to convince us that the interior of the Earth is a deception, that until we escape from the darkness and are illuminated by our solar star we are not able to discern what is real and what is not. But Socrates becomes blind when exposed to sunlight. The knowledge is such that it becomes physically unbearable.
In SOTA TERRA, the darkness abducts you; There is no fear, but there is mystery. Reason struggles to make its way and try to understand what happens inside, to illuminate and explain how people lived, what the constant temperature was, what the reasons were for staying there, how stalactites are created and preserved and how everything inside has been preserved, static. The mind begins to function until, inevitably, it stops for lack of answers. Knowledge becomes unbearable, but, instead of punishing us, desire speaks, the senses overcome reason, and the body decides simply to be, remain silent and try to listen to the sound of the cave, of the interior of the Earth, until, as the scientist from Chauvet says, we get to listen to our own hearts.
At that moment comes understanding. In the most absolute darkness, questions do not need to be answered. It is another world, an unknown space that society has not reached and that perseveres in preventing its arrival, in preventing it from penetrating and perverting the virginal state of the origin of the world, of the beginnings of our lives.
Irene Vicente Salas, November 5, 2023
