Liquid Relations: Listening Back in Time

Liquid Relations: Listening Back in Time is a sound installation, created and exhibited for the 14th Multimedia Biennale of Santiago, Chile. It consists of lithium salts and resin, water, meteorites, steel, leather, gauze, found remains from the political demonstrations in Santiago 2019, loudspeaker, and NASA’s sound recordings. It measures 350 cm in diameter. 

The work explores themes of personal identity and the connections between self, family, and the cosmos. The iron figures, with their anthropomorphic forms, can be associated with family members of varying heights and shapes. They are arranged in elliptical orbits above curved metal and wooden floor pieces, imitating the course of our planets and the rings of Saturn. At the center of the installation, a speaker emits sounds derived from radio and plasma waves recorded by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft near Saturn's rings. The incorporation of harmonious sounds stems from the idea of a cosmos created through harmonious proportions.

The installation combines industrial and archaeological elements, connecting human transience with the profound continuity of the Earth. Kalsmose works with materials from lived reality, such as remains from demonstrations in Santiago, Chile – where she was personally present – and combines them with archaeological materials from earlier times and outer space, such as meteorites. Although these materials can be linked to specific moments, they extend across multiple temporalities and thereby reflect how we are connected to larger cycles of existence.

The work is part of the larger Cosmic Family series, where Kalsmose explores family not only as a social unit but as a metaphysical one. Like Cosmic Relations and Cosmic Family, Liquid Relations gestures toward speculative pasts and futures—moments when matter, memory, and relationships merge into form. The installation becomes a kind of time-instrument, sounding into the unknown while listening back through geological and cultural time. Rather than separating scientific knowledge from emotional truth, the work suggests that identity is neither fixed nor isolated but shaped by everything around and before us. It reminds us that we are part of systems we both form and are formed by—and that listening, at its deepest, is an act of relational recognition across distance, scale, and time.