Listening to the Earth (Under the Asphalt)

Abstract

The ecological crisis highlights the need to rethink the question of habitation. This requires reconceiving the links between the Earth and its inhabitants. There are two main approaches that converge in this reinvention. The first proposes a poetic habitation (Heidegger). The second calls for changing the paradigm of domination for that of listening (Cage). This entails positing the Earth as a totality and acknowledging the links between the crises that affect us: environmental, social and mental (Guattari). From here, the notion of aisthēsis is revived to suggest a poï-ethical listening that is exemplified here according to the two approaches mentioned above. De agua, viento y verdor, the practices of “walking the word” and the project Voces que caminan, are examples of the former that link words to their sacred character. Representative of the latter, Cuerpospermeables by Eulalia de Valdenebro, is based on a critique of colonial botany, contrasting it with a decolonial posthumanism that can take the form of a body that becomes a wind instrument.