Resonant Landscapes: Unravelling History Through Sound in Broersen & Lukács’ Two Songs

Two Songs is a solo exhibition by artist duo Broersen & Lukács, currently on view at the Netherlands Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Curated by LI-MA's Sanneke Huisman and Theus Zwakhals, Two Songs addresses the central theme of the Biennale, which is under the artistic direction of Nicolas Bourriaud: PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century. Lukács & Broersen's exhibition explores the intersection of landscape and soundscape, revealing complex socio-political histories through sound. 

Over the past few months, the artists and curators have worked closely together and with a team of local experts in South Korea to realise the exhibition, which opened on 6 September in the presence of artist Persijn Broersen, curator Theus Zwakhals, Peter van der Vliet (Ambassador), Kim Joon-gi (Director of the Gwangju Museum of Art), Kang Gi-jung (Mayor of Gwangju Metropolitan City) and Park Yang-woo (President of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation). Two Songs will be on view at the Gwangju Museum of Art until 1 December 2024. In this blog post, LI-MA curator Sanneke Huisman adds further context to the exhibition and the two works by Lukács & Broersen included in it. Whether you’re planning to visit the exhibition in South Korea or following from afar, we hope you’ll enjoy the insights offered here.

Two Songs

Imagine a forest. Imagine the wilderness. Think about their voices. What do they sound like? What kind of songs would they sing? If you answer these questions from a Western perspective: nature howls, growls, and whispers. In the Western imagination, nature is the non-human other, an animal. It is untamed, unexplored, and exotic. In Two Songs, the artist duo Lukács & Broersen give nature a voice beyond this stereotypical representation and perception. They deconstruct the concept of nature and wilderness by thoroughly remaking and reconstructing it through digital means. Using technologies such as photogrammetry and 3D modelling, they create virtual replicas of existing natural environments that function as stages for songs to be sung and stories to be whispered — as answers to questions we never had.

The First Song: The Forest

In their 2019 film, Forest on Location, the artists invite the viewer to enter Europe’s last primeval forest, the Bialowieza Forest, wedged between Belarus and Poland. This is not a one-to-one reconstruction: Lukács & Broersen bring the existing place to life in a fragmented, digitised, and distorted way. The ancient forest is transformed into a glitchy environment where the natural recto meets the digital verso. As the camera glides over the bits and pieces of digital trees, it becomes clear that this is a stage — but for what? The answer comes about halfway through the film when a digitally constructed figure enters the stage. He is the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani. As he slowly inhabits his virtual habitat, he takes over the film’s soundtrack by performing his own rendition of Nat King Cole’s famous “Nature Boy”, a song that surprisingly has its roots in the Bialowieza region and is said to be of Yiddish origin — telling a story of migration and loss. Set in a forest that has historically been, and is now again, divided as a region of conflict, the song encapsulates complex historical narratives. Yazdani becomes a spokesman for nature, allowing it to show its scars and fears and to tell its many hidden secrets.

The Second Song: The Wilderness

Walt Disney’s film The Jungle Book (1967) and the 1894 book by Rudyard Kipling on which it is based are emblematic of Western imperialism, not only othering nature and animals but also bearing colonial traces. In I Wan’na Be Like You, named after the song of the same name from Disney’s film, nature again functions as a stage. A ghostly figure appears and seduces the viewer with a dance and a song reminiscent of the song from The Jungle Book. Is this a ghost from the past or an overlooked being from the present? And either way, what is it trying to say? These questions are not left unanswered. The scene is set in the dilapidated glasshouse of a Western botanical garden, a place where ‘exotic’ nature is tamed and studied for the scientific needs of mankind. A place where plant and tree species from colonised countries are othered and externalised. It is in this virtual enclosure that the wounds of the past must be healed. After its song and dance, the ghostly creature disappears to make way for the avatars of the Afro-Surinamese music group Black Harmony. They walk towards the greenhouse and confidently sing “Na mi,” “I am,” in their native language — a song that is their version of the Disney song. The imprisoned plants watch in silence as these characters reclaim their history and existence through song, in an environment that seems more like the future: a digitised copy of it.

In Two Songs, man’s relationship to nature and the power structures at play are brought to the fore through image and sound. If nature is untamed, it is only from a human, and in these specific cases Eurocentric, perspective. In their work, Lukács & Broersen draw parallels between Western notions of nature and wilderness and their deeply religious, mythological, and imperialist structures. They show how humans have always had a hierarchical relationship with nature, often resulting in its exploitation and appropriation — as has all too often been the case with ‘human others’. And that this is one of the reasons why nature is slowly disappearing.

Lukács & Broersen explicitly use technology to reveal hidden histories and narratives. In Two Songs, nature is the protagonist through the eyes of human tools, suspended between the physical and the virtual, the real and the imaginary. Two Songs is neither about technology nor nature. Two Songs is about us. Listen carefully and hear them sing our forgotten memories and whisper our uncertain future.

Sanneke Huisman is a curator at LI-MA.

Still: Broersen & Lukács, I Wan'na Be Like You, 2024, 13:44 min., in collection: LI-MA. Images courtesy of AKINCI.