Sounds from Beneath

Sounds from Beneath began with the artist Mikhail Karikis inviting a coal miners’ choir to recall and sing the sounds they used to hear when they worked inside a coal mine. In collaboration with Uriel Orlow, the artists created a video that is set on the disused Tilmanstone colliery in South East England, which is brought back to life through the song of the miners who worked there and lost their jobs in 1986 when the then British government lead by Margaret Thatcher closed the coalmine. In this video, the sunken desolate coalmine transforms into an amphitheater resonating sounds of subterranean explosions, mechanical clangs, grinding elevators, shovels scratching the earth, and a miners’ lament all sung by the old miners grouping in formations reminiscent of picket lines. As the curator and writer Katerina Gregos highlights, “at once political and poetic, the film cuts through any expected conventional documentary realism and resonates with pathos dignity and emotional force. It functions as a salvaging of memory, an ode, a tribute, and a requiem all at once. It captures the essence of the act of coal mining, while recalling the picket lines and intimating a strong sense of male identity and the solidarity of sharing a common purpose in work and song.”