Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate (Bosch Requiem 2024) is a large-scale musical and visual installation, a joint work by composer Micha Hamel and artist Jonas Staal. The musical composition is inspired by geological time scales of the deep past and the deep future, and consists of a six-hour work for surround electronic music, intersected at regular intervals by instrumental and vocal interventions. The visual installation is a landscape consisting of fossils from deep Earth’s past – from motor oil to fossilized ammonites – and images of what will probably form the fossil archive of the future. Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate is the eighth edition of the Bosch Requiem that November Music organizes annually. This time in collaboration and in the Noordbrabants Museum.

Not only people work, animals, plants and bacteria also perform forms of work. This collective work produces a viable biosphere over long periods of time. We are all ‘Earth Workers’ – in the words of writer Radha D’Souza. The musical performance of Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate consists of echoes from the deep past, human and electrically generated sounds, as well as sounds from the deep future, which is performed six hours a day for ten days, and can be visited any time of the day . These intensive sound layers try to commemorate and depict earth workers across different time periods, as a contemporary version of the International, in which all workers of the earth – not just people – and all time periods of the earth are united.

The landscape-like installation in which the composition is performed consists of various types of fossils such as petrified ammonites, placed on black wedges soaked in motor oil that refer to revolutionary constructivist art. The ammonite here is literally the fossil in fossil fuel. In between, woven banners are set up, showing images of plants and animals that thrive in the climate crisis. They are the fossils of the future.

In this way, the deep past and deep future become audible, visible and tangible in the temporal landscape, a place of contemplation, crisis and protest at the same time. Visitors are invited to take a seat in the landscape as fossils-in-the-making among the fossils of the past and future. As earthworkers among earthworkers, who are encouraged to radical solidarity.

Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate commemorates (Requiem) and celebrates (Jubilate) our collective history and future as earthworkers at a critical time for our current ecosystem. A breaking point in time, in which our extinction has become the profit model of the criminal fossil industry. But also a moment where we as earthworkers of all time can unite to fight for a collective deep future.

During the festival from Saturday 9 to Sunday 17 November, live performances will take place every day (with the exception of Monday 11 November) from 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate can then be visited as an exhibition until Sunday, March 9, 2025.

November Music in collaboration with the Het Noordbrabants Museum. With thanks to the Willem Twee Studios and TextielLab.