Deep Recovery

Deep Recovery at Kresen Kernow

Deep Recovery will be at Kresen Kernow from the afternoon of Saturday 25 November until Saturday 16 December 2023, and will be available during our usual opening hours (Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 9.30-4.00). Please ask to access it at reception.

About: Deep Recovery (2023) is a sonic fragment comprising a sound work and small risograph publication housed in a bespoke archival box fabricated by Rhea Evers. The work is designed to be sited in archival spaces and experienced as an intimate act of listening.

Responding to a research visit to the British Geological Survey archives in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, as well as the narratives told about granite in the artist’s home of West Cornwall, Sibungu’s work questions the colonial logic of archiving: what is determined worth storing, what becomes erased, and whose perspectives are valued. Deep Recovery plays with the form of an archival object whilst existing as an unruly sonic fragment, a trace of embodied knowledge.

The work was developed through a series of workshops led by the artist together with a group of mixed heritage women artists* living in West Cornwall, walking in the granite-rich landscape, visiting sites of geological significance, and making field recordings, before later translating these embodied experiences to language, improvisation and collective reflection. The resulting sound work includes excerpts of these field recordings alongside poetic scripts written by the artist and performed by the women involved.

*Vocal contributions by the unruly artists, singers, writers, healers, mothers: Maria Christoforidou, Caroline Deeds, Catherine Lucktaylor and Angeline Morrison.