Disaster, like sound, knows no borders. To listen to the artificial and jagged noises of the video and sound installation looped on three screens by Aura Satz Pending warnings, 2023, is about abandoning the otherwise fluid collaboration between the senses, abandoning the idea that anything that seems unnerving will most likely feel that way too. Within the installation, which includes excerpts from Preemptive listening, 2018-, Satz pushes to the sensory divide. Various sirens parked in empty parking lots and bright yellow fields in Lapland, Fukushima and the United States read as indifferent, even ambient. Instrumental documentation mixes the poignancy of what might have been with a grievance for what once was. In an instant, the artist combines a subtitle suggesting that the sirens “keep the future in mind through sound” with low moans of atomic incidents from the past. In a moment or two, the alarm bells flatten out, followed by endless metallic rumbles – sonic residues of all that’s left.
Eventually, the footage heads towards the Fukushima sea wall. Here, Satz nods to the etymological continuity between factory-approved sirens and their mythological counterparts, giving us masochistic beauty and self-inflicted violence. At one point, a screen shows workers molding mermaids from raw materials. The whistles are layered with chops, saws, distant screams, and a hurt howl that sound more like an invitation to mourn than a signal to seek shelter. Perhaps this odyssey of rapid, deafening returns is just the end result of our sad urge to escape.
