2024-On-going
AUDIO_
Text & concept : Helena Sanders
The voice of the Kobold : Marcus Zilz (DE)
Recording and mastering : Marcus Zilz (DE)
Text design/layout : Michael Petri (AT)
Riso Printing at : Stencil Zolder (NL)
A version of Kobold Talk was installed at Kobold on the Unemployment Line PuntWG, Amsterdam in 2024
Kobold Talk is a text and audio work as well as the umbrella name for an on-going artistic research project exploring the historic context of the Kobold and its contemporary progeny, expressions of desire and possession evidenced in law, art and ecology, acts of refusal, un-waged labor, and a story of the many hues of Blue.
The mythological Kobold spends a lifetime underground, living deep within mountain ranges rich with ore; a caretaker of sorts at the threshold between Deep Time and Capitalist Temporalities. This figure was born in 14th-15th century Europe - around the same time Georgius Agricola publishes his volumes on geology and metallurgy, and under the rule of the first “Bergordnung” (mineral rights) of the Holy Roman Empire. At a time when kings and lords felt they claimed dominion over the land and all that lived on it, and suddenly, what might be under it as well, Kobold stories told in the vernacular begin to proliferate...and do so across all levels of society, from the peasantry to the clergy to the landowning class.
Kobolds are tricksters rarely seen but often heard; a poltergeist sending speculators and miners threats through falling rock, rumblings, cave-ins and knocks from deep underground. When Kobold does appear, it’s said to have the appearance and dress of a child-sized Medieval miner, and who mocks and mimics the labor of the workers, passing rocks back and forth from one bucket into another, “pretending to do something, while accomplishing nothing,” a kind of supernatural drag performance.
The mineral Cobalt and later the color pigment Cobalt Blue, were both named after the Kobold and their poisonous “Kobold ore”. Swedish chemist Georg Brandt first isolated and identified cobalt as a metal in 1742.
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Kobold Talk (audio work & poster) is rant from a Kobold at the end of its rope, so to speak. It imagines a day in our present when the Kobold finds that its job as caretaker of the mine has been made obsolete; a speculative other-than-human telling-off.
Full Audio of KOBOLD TALK on request, sample below.
(Public Domain image)
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