Disaster, like sound, does not recognize borders. To listen to the artificial, jagged noises in Aura Satz’s looped three-screen video and sound installation Warnings in Waiting, 2023, is to ditch the otherwise smooth collaboration among the senses, abandoning the inkling that whatever sounds unnerving will most likely look that way, too. Within the installation, which comprises excerpts from Preemptive Listening, 2018-, Satz pushes for sensory fracture. Various sirens stationed across empty parking lots and crisp yellow fields in Lapland, Fukushima, and the United States read as indifferent—ambient even. Documentation of the instruments mingles the poignancy of what might have been with a grievance for what once was. In one instant, the artist pairs a subtitle suggesting that sirens are “holding in mind the future through sound” with faint wailings from atomic incidents of the past. In another moment or two, the alarm bells flatten, to be followed by endless metallic rumbles—sonic residues of whatever remains.
Eventually, the footage pans to the seawall of Fukushima. Here, Satz winks at the etymological continuity between factory-approved sirens and their mythological counterparts, offering us masochistic beauty and a self-inflicted violence. At one point, a screen shows workers molding siren casts from crude material. Whistles are layered with chopping, sawing, faraway shrieking, and an injured howling that feel more like an invitation to mourn than a signal to run for cover. Perhaps this odyssey of sweeping, deafening returns is just the end result of our sorry craving for escape.
