Miguel Álvarez-Fernández | Roots of the Phonocene (Towards a Dictionary of Vegetal Aphasia)

Roots of the Phonocene (Towards a Dictionary of Vegetal Aphasia is a sound installation by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández that offers FLORA audiences an active listening experience. Human beings are as alien to the logic of language as they are to plants. This installation is based on this strangeness, but also on what we know and recognise: the names of different plant beings that surround us – or could surround us, exercising our imagination – during our walks through the Huerto de Orive.

From then on, the strange logic of words – a logic that perhaps resembles that of plants, with their ever-mysterious etymological roots and their even more enigmatic phonetic ramifications, syntactic arborescences and semantic blossoms – begins to sprout, and even to sprout out. Those names we recognised begin to germinate, to grow, to transform. Open your ears wide: whether or not you recognise what the Huerto de Orive tells you in this installation, it is part of who we are.

Curator’s text:
“Plants follow logics that are alien to us. We do not understand how these beings – so close and yet so distant – communicate. Plants do not have a language like ours. But do we manage the language, or is it the other way around?
(…)
Roots of the Phonocene starts from what we know and, above all, recognise: names of different vegetable beings (flowers, plants, trees, etc.) that surround us – or could surround us, exercising our imagination – during our walks through the Huerto de Orive, names pronounced in Spanish. From there, the strange logic of words, similar to that of plants – with their etymological rooting and semantic blossoming – begins to sprout. The names transform, germinate, elongate, metamorphose into other languages. Like plants, these words intertwine, revealing their mysterious genealogies, hybridising to adapt to new habitats”.
(Miguel Álvarez-Fernández)