Monologue for the Second Land
Artist & Creative Direction - Leo Robinson
Director of Photography - Buster Grey-Jung
B Cam Operator - Anna Niah Patterson
Gaffer - Joe Nkadi
Sound Recordist - Simone Carty
Production Manager - Molly M. Whawell
Costume - Rosie Jones-Burslem
Hair - Toni-Ann Malcom
MUA - Yoi Wan
‘the carvers carve on and on through time’
In the 1970s, the Golden Record was created to introduce humanity to extraterrestrial life. Half a century later, Artangel presents Earth Rising, a concept album that introduces humanity to itself. Composed of new audio works, Earth Rising, Volume I presents a cross-section of the human experience – revealing our will to survive, our tangled relationship with love, and our drive to create. Launched into the solar system in 1977, the Golden Record was intended to be an audio/visual time capsule of Earth, presenting carefully selected sounds and images to other life forms across space. Earth Rising keeps its intentions on the ground, exploring the complexity and depth of what it means to be human.
The album opens with Leo Robinson’s audio-visual artwork Monologue for the Second Land. Set in a mythologised St Vincent, a priestess guides a seeker embarking on a journey of understanding and belonging. She indicates that clues have been left in the form of petroglyphs by ancestral stone-carvers, encountered across centuries throughout colonial and contemporary histories. The piece ends with a declaration that the storytellers endure, bearing witness and leaving messages for seekers yet to come.
You can hear/see all the artists' beautiful works as an album on https://earth-rising.com/
Monologue for The Second Land
An iridescent bridge dreams you into the unknown;
Explosive and volcanic,
The soil fertile and shimmering with ash, iguana droppings, dasheen, cocoa…
The hushed and unspoken blood of the elders,
and the first people crying upon the wind like seeds, like smoke.
Traveller - you have struggled to hold these cries that disperse,
this blood that runs down, down, absorbed by the earth.
Traveller - it looks like they left you nothing to hold, although…
there’s something there, by the river where the callalloo grows.
The stone carvers, they were here too?
The stone carvers, the sign leavers,
those who knew you would come,
who have been busy in every land, preparing your odyssey.
What gifts? What spirits did they leave for you?
And before you, traveller, arrived from the third land by sky
Others arrived on boats from yet a different land…
What messages, then?
What then?
How do you think these stones react to light?
Are they pictures? Or mirrors?
Imagine what reflects back to she whose gods were drowned.
Imagine what a message means to he whose tongue is tied and wrists bound,
Or the imperialist who slays in the name of his own gods,
Who bears the cross upon his sword,
Who denounces heathens with violent acts…
The carvers carve on and on through time.
