Hole Depth - 202 meters
At the very top of the hill the futuristic architecture piece shaped as a cylinder called “Sonic Pavilion” rested. Landed on a terrain which colors stepped from burnt grass-green and rusty rock-red, seemingly emerged from the earth’s massive core the exposition and installation art mix created by the artist Doug Aitkens is held at Inhotim’s Center of Contemporary Art, the biggest open air contemporary art gallery in the world, located on Minas Gerais state southeastern of Brazil. The lustrous facade glowed in shiny metal and bright light blue and soft green. The lenticular filmed glass was only translucent if stared directly, without any diversions or hesitations of what it holds inside.
The entrance a tunnel dug in the hill supported by tall concrete walls then transformed into a right-handed helix gently tilted leading its curious guest to both the top of the mountain and the circular room itself. The dreamy light that pierced the vitric walls and the pallets of marqueted ocher floor resembling a freshly started jigsaw assembly welcomed me to the exhibit, with no hanging paintings on the wall, standing sculptures or textures to admire. The pavilion vibrated with awkwardly misplaced sounds, which I reckoned from other sites I’ve been and times I’ve lived interpolated, interlaced echoing in this room.
The blowing wind thrusting a temperate forest and the unintelligible sound of whales communicating. The nervous sound of solitude in a dark room, and the suffocated panicked shout for help. The persistent mumbling of cars tires smashing the concrete sections in a tunnel so lengthy that light at its end cannot be seen. They are constantly generated in a 202 meters deep hole exactly in the middle of the room that pierces Earth’s rugged soil and permeates its hydric veins. The hole serves the place as a birth cord to an infant. Steel cables hang microphones that amplify and propagate sounds we can’t experience at the surface: the flow of underground aquifers and soil’s inherent dynamics, constantly bursting through hidden speakers in the hall. On the shell I’m in it’s not the sound of the waves I listen to, but the Earth’s voice unrevealed.
I lie on the floor prisoner of the stunning preciousness of what I listen. Mumblings made their way deep into my mind and one by one, one after the other, mount a story that vibrates the drums in my ear and the strings in my soul. It had no start or end nor repeats itself . Stories of the men who first worked on that land, their love and hatred, gods and demons – tales of their rise and fall. It sometimes seems laugh, having fun with jokes older than comprehension itself.
Still lying on the floor, I gaze the water colored forest painted in secret greens, forgotten blues and divinely pure white. The sensation of not knowing anything about the place I’m in and all of its truths is inevitable, exactly like the smile drawn on my face.
