Expected
9 November 2024 to 9 March 2025

Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate

Bosch Requiem 2024 in collaboration with November Music

The Noordbrabants Museum and November Music festival present Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate: a newly commissioned musical composition and large scale immersive installation by composer Micha Hamel and artist Jonas Staal that honors human and non-human Earth Workers across deep pasts, presents and futures.

Past, Present and Future

The musical composition by Hamel is inspired on geological timescales crossing deep past and deep future, and consists of six-our long electronic music, combined with live instrumental and vocal interventions. The visual installation in which the durational music piece is performed, consists of a fossil landscape made of pyramids of motor oil and ammonite fossils – fossils and fossil fuels that constitute earth memory – as well as woven banners depicting the very rare life forms that thrive in climate catastrophe and that will form the impoverished fossil archives of the future.

Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate is performed in full every day between 11:00 and 17:00. As a visitor, you can enter or leave at any time during opening hours.

Earth Workers

Human animals are not the only laborers on earth: nonhuman animals, plants and bacteria also work. This collective work is what has constituted a livable biosphere across long periods of time. We are all Earth Workers, in the words of writer Radha D’Souza. The intensive sonic layers of Hamel’s composition, combined with fossils of past and future earth workers by Staal, attempt to honor earth workers across different temporalities. As an expansion of the socialist hymn, the International, the piece calls to unite not only all workers of the world but also all of the world’s times.

Bosch Requiem

Each year, around All Saints’ Day, a new Bosch Requiem is performed during November Music. It is an annual composition commission for a Dutch composer. This year, the choice fell on composer, conductor, and poet Micha Hamel (Amsterdam, 1970). Hamel had been seeking an opportunity to collaborate with visual artist Jonas Staal (Zwolle, 1981) for some time.

November Music

During the November Music festival (November 9 to 17, excluding November 11), live performances will take place. The exhibition will remain on display until March 9, 2025.

November Music is an eleven-day festival for adventurous music lovers. Every year, it brings together the most innovative and avant-garde creators and musicians from around the world. The festival features modern composed music, jazz, new world music, music theater, pop, installations, and music in genres yet to be discovered.

Credits

Micha Hamel - composition
Jonas Staal - visual artist
Koen Kaptijn - trombone (not 12, 13 en 14 Nov)
Khadija Massaoudi - singing 
Inez Nuijten - performer (not 12 nov)
Jasper Schweppe - zang (not 12, 13 en 14 Nov)
Tomas Valečka - sounddesign, sound technique
Maria Goetze - singing (on tape)
Capella Brabant - choir, voices (on tape) 

 

With the support of

Good to know: In Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate, the composition is an important part of the installation. The music is played at a considerable volume and may be experienced as intense; therefore, ear protection is available at the entrance of the exhibition rooms for visitors who prefer it.

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