Tomorrow Will Be Louder — Louis Braddock Clarke

The exhibition by artist Louis Braddock Clarke entitled Tomorrow Will Be Louder is a cooperation between Recontemporary and Seeyousound International Music Film Festival. Following their installation of Weather Gardens at the 2023 Venice Biennale and having international shows, Tomorrow Will Be Louder is Louis’ first solo exhibition in Italy. The exhibition is curated by Alessandro Maccarrone and is realized in collaboration with VI.MA.

Tomorrow Will Be Louder alludes to the ever sounding surfaces of our Earth, and how our inaudible soundscapes are getting louder and louder, heavier and heavier. The exhibition positions itself in a world of infrasound, an sonic bandwidth between 0 – 20Hz. Once the space of natural disaster and meteorological shifting, is now saturated with human sounds evidential of climate collapse. Everyday infrasound energy increases in quantity and intensity as we see more and more disasters, geopolitics, landgrabs, wars, genocides, colonisations (earth and space), and an inherent condition of capitalism to keep accelerating. These entanglements of devastation manifest in sound, and echo around the Earth as long waves. Silent to the human ear, but full of energy, crossing borders, and touching all of us. It is infrasound that moves our bodies to the subwoofers in techno clubs, it is infrasound that flirts with ghosts, and it is infrasound that will be the sonic evidence of the Anthropocene. 

Tomorrow Will Be Louder transforms the Recontemporary space into a geology of another world: a world of sonic imagination, the dissent of disasters, and hallucinations of bacteria.  The topics of intimacy, anomalies, and attunement sit at the core of this exhibition, focussing on how more-than-human listening can entangle our bodies closer to a deteriorating Earth. The film UNDER BOOM situates itself inside a volcano, playing the role of a giant geological ear. This underground ear canal bursts with infrasounds from all over the world – from illegal airstrikes to calving glaciers, from burning oil to bellowing whales. The world is shifting, and Louis wants us all to hear it boom. Silent Sun Splatter takes place inside the same volcano, the work is an intoxication of infrasound, rare earth elements, and the inhabitant bacterias of the underground. A series of long-exposure photographic prints are controlled by the time-frames and shutterspeeds of disasters. The analogical negatives are soaked in the volcanoes bacteria for months – allowing the Earth to make its own exposure, burns, dodges, and photographs. 

The exhibition Tomorrow Will Be Louder imagines a space in which we can become intimate with our sonic ecology. We can imagine the sounds as having many sources and many meanings to further build worlds, dreams, and hallucinations from. The works can be seen as a call to action, to listen deeper, and tune into new imaginaries. Louis’ collaboration with geology shows the whispering testimonies of what the Earth feels and hears. Knowing that Tomorrow Will Be Louder and more oppressive sonics are coming sparks a question; Will the Earth be dancing or dying? 

Extraordinary hours: from 22 to 28 February the exhibition will be open from 15.30 – 19.30