Preemptive Listening

“Preemptive”: Aura Satz uses a specific word for the title of her film. The Cambridge Dictionary says: «pre-empt: to do or say something before someone so that you make their words or actions unnecessary or not effective». The listening to the sirens would make our future deeds destined to be empty, to be sheer execution of commands. Pre-emption steals our future, insofar as it writes it down. That being said, the film opens with a future-oriented sentence: «This is an experiment in listening forward», a listening that seems the opposite of a pre-emptive listening. The originality of Aura Satz’ project sits exactly in this in-between space: between the focus on sirens as expression of pre-emptive policies like the ones of «emergency management», «predictive governance», or «preventive architecture», and the exploration of sirens as opportunities to listen forward, to be aware of the importance of a listening that is not part of any restrictive policy but the founder of non-violent politics.

The Greek etymology of “siren” appears to refer to a certain “entangling” – and the mythological sirens (that the film does not consider at all) would confirm the idea of a threatening attraction, of the risk of becoming captive, blocked, deprived of freedom. In the film we are also reminded of another etymology – the Italian one of “alarm” from “all’arme”, the command to get the arms in order to fight against the threating enemy. Sirens are also the often imperceptible symptoms of warfare. We could refer to Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s research on the use of sounds in order to weaken civilians in bio war strategies, or directly to Daphne Carr lucid explaining in the film of the social pressure of sirens used as “deterrence devices”. As instruments of captivity, sirens do not work only on the sound level but also on the visual one, for the sirens’ light is designed to disturb, interrupt, obstruct us. The sociological reflections of Preemptive Listening constitute a formidable strength of the film, in that they reveal the perceptual, aesthetic layer that is activated in restrictive policies. It is question of an aesthetic of saturation, which actually amounts to a form of anaesthesia.

This strong message, that is often conveyed as claim, finds in the form of the film a sort of counterbalance or resistance. We can say that the anaesthetic power of sirens is dismantled by the aesthetic formal choice of the film, for Aura Satz’ film is highly aesthetical in avoiding any form of saturation. It mobilises our visual and audio perceptions, that bear witness to a constructive aesthetics. On one side, the sound of the sirens is constantly transformed through a series of artistic sound compositions that constitute a fundamental collaborative part of her project. On the other, with its circular movements, the camera – so often on a drone! – expresses so explicitly the all-encompassing dimension of sirens that it allows us to seize its self-critical potential towards any totalitarian approach. Moreover, the insistence on the material, infrastructural aspect of the sirens that Satz shows in their design and their production, not without a pleasure for abstract image composition, has a clearly demystifying effect.

The film also works as a sirens’ antidote in its being precise and specific against the essential non-specificity of sirens. «Sirens are placeholder of words» – says Aura Satz’ voice-over, and the profound and accurate texts that she collects in the film constitute a perfect answer to the totalitarian monologue of sirens. Her voice-over is accompanied by other voices that witness the complexity of the topic: from the mental health issues concerning social and care workers in daily contact with sirens of police or ambulances (Asantewaa Boykin, Niki Jones) to the colonialist authoritarianism imposed on indigenous populations (Erin Matariki Carr), probably the heirs of church’s bells or minaret’s voices. Through all these aspects, Preemptive Listening stresses a practice of listening that is not disconnected from nature, that is free and dialogic, a practice that the sirens, negatively, can make us aware of.

This highly critical approach to sirens also includes a positive assessment of them, insofar as they should embody the urgent cry against the destruction of the planet and its social and natural bonds. In this respect, there are sirens that are not warning enough, and gigantic images of the abandoned carbon industry will transform themselves into a kind of visual siren of alarm about the preoccupying global situation that is often expressed through the word “Anthropocene”. From this perspective, through Arturo Escobar’s reflection, the film advocates for an epistemic transformation from emergency to emergence, from the attitude of fear to the task of imagining a new creative design for our cohabitation of the planet. Thus, the film does not only make us conscious of the biopolitics of warning through the obscurantist power of sirens, but also takes sirens as the opportunity to imagine other ways in which to escape the suffocating reality of Anthropocene as self-destructive spiral.