This film was created to be presented alongside live readings from Michael Salu's book Red Earth, with additional live sound elements taken from the book.
In this performative reading, artist, writer and scholar Michael Salu opens up the cinema space for a meditation on listening to the polyphonous dimensions of earth – inhumane and human – and to the frequencies of colonial afterlives. Drawing from his recent literary work, Red Earth (2023), Salu coalesces sound, words, image and space into a multi-sensual choreography on selfhood, grief and loss meshing towards nonhuman perspectives.
Listening to the Red Earth was first performed and screened at Gropius Bau Museum, Berlin, in October 2023 and since has since appeared at the British Library, London, the Black Cultural Archives and the Royal College of Art.
Directed, shot and animated by Michael Salu.
Runtime 42 mins