It sounds like a plane is taking off in the gallery space. On a huge screen, figures urgently run forwards and backwards, in and out of the frame, right to left, left to right. Our close attention is required to see that the film isn’t being reversed – when they run backwards, they really are propelling themselves back without seeing, immersed in going nowhere, cancelling out their progress. The distinctive noise comes from their breathing, the runners vocalising their every inhalation. When this sequence began, this produced a litany of fragile, mournful sounds that might have been cries of desperation, but now, as their collective breath builds to a crescendo, the sound is of a powerful machine, roaring into life.
This is part of Mikhail Karikis’ multimedia artwork, Songs for the Storm to Come at HOME, Manchester. The piece combines different video works to ask questions about the individual’s role in the climate emergency: how are we to understand it, solve it, live in it? Drawing on texts by indigenous writer Ailton Krenak and political thinker Achille Mbembe, and the work of experimental queer composer Pauline Oliveros, it finds answers in the power of communities to heal and survive, looking unflinchingly towards the challenges of the future.
The visitor is greeted on arrival by a group of television screens positioned at floor-level, displaying footage of what appear to be geological phenomena: rocks and sands, trembling. Central to the piece is an eleven-minute-long video created in collaboration with SHE Choir, an inclusive, Manchester-based community choir for women and non-binary singers. They are the ones we see running onscreen. The piece was generated through deep listening workshops inspired by Oliveros and led by Karikis. Over the course of the video, they address the viewer with to-camera statements and provocations (‘We are together because we have no other options.’ ‘We are together because you saved me.’ ‘We are together because modernity has fucked it.’), and address one another in conversation; they sing, make noise, and listen. Their movement has been co-ordinated by Brazilian choreographer Maruan Sipert, with this aspect of the piece drawing from social choreography, a discipline that looks closely at our bodies in relation to one another, and how they interact with and take up space in the world.

Certainly, the positioning of the performers’ bodies is used subtly and impactfully. Cross-legged and intimate, two choir members pore over maps of what Great Britain is projected to look like in 2050. In livid orange, a monstrous Thames removes huge bites from central London; the pair gasp in disbelief at a new island forming as swathes of the North East disappear. A reading from Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor, a text seeking to inspire readers toward long-term thinking as a solution to avert large-scale crises, including climate breakdown,sees listeners lounging comfortably around the speaker, all sprawling on the floor together. Moments like this feel shorn of didacticism, and as significant as the clear-eyed view of the climate emergency they espouse is their manner of communication, full of consideration and care. We will need softness to survive what is next, it seems to be saying – we will need to be ourselves to one another. As a result, the interspersed shots of them lying on the ground, separate and eerily still, are silently effective in evoking what is at stake. Death is disconnection. The map-readers’ simple question, spoken while taking a bird’s-eye view of a city— ‘Where are all the people gonna go?’— invites large-scale thinking, and looks ahead to the displacement of great numbers of the population, the delicate and enormous task of a societal choreography to come.
Returning to the geologic videos, they reveal themselves to be something even more interesting: cymatics. This is the use of sound to vibrate tiny particles of matter, and these videos, made in collaboration with university researchers Dr Neil Bruce and Matteo Polato, depict, in extreme close-up, water, sand and cornstarch being manipulated by the vocalisations of SHE Choir. What seemed gigantic is in fact miniature, subtle, and fragile, perhaps pointing to the shift in thinking Songs for the Storm to Come seems to suggest: that the world-scale emergency of rising sea levels must first be faced on the scale of the personal, with one’s immediate community. There is hope, perhaps, in seeing the tangible effect we may have on the world without even touching it—that physical change can happen simply through an interaction with the human voice. Deep attention is invited by such a close view, and the viewer is invited to consider their constant impact and interaction with the natural world in a way that is, ordinarily, invisible to them. It’s a point underlined by the choir: ‘You are already symbiotic.’

A move toward the abstract in the central film emphasises this, too. We see the choir enter holding flags, warrior-like. Then, amid a flurry of chaotic noise – wails, moans, bird-cheeps, the rushing of water, the groaning of trees—they wave them. These sounds seem to be field recordings—then it gradually becomes apparent they are being produced by the choir themselves, and have been dubbed over the footage we are seeing. Karikis opts not to show us the choir making these sounds, and any distinction the viewer wishes to find between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ therefore seems to be beside the point: ‘you are already symbiotic.’ All the while, we inch closer to the waving flags. Conventionally symbols of nationhood, surrender or emergency, these unadorned, block-hued flags fill the screen until they are little other than strobes of colour, seeming to communicate a distress that exceeds the constraints of an exclusively human emergency, taking in all we are symbiotic with.
Tension is also communicated through rising pitch and intensity within sung speech. Staring straight down the barrel of the camera, reciting the reasons they are together, the singers begin to speak over one another. The reasoning becomes a fitful amalgam: there are hundreds of reasons, there are no reasons. When a song erupts from the babble, it is one comprised of staccato notes that communicate panic like the sounding of an alarm, and one reason is given: ‘We are together because we are together because we are together…’, repeated over and over, an undercurrent of dread simmering throughout. It seems to invite comparison with the First World War soldiers’ song ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here…’, another message from individuals who found themselves caught, seemingly inescapably, in their own senseless doom.
Throughout all this, a baby is held by one of the speakers. After the discussion of what the country will look like in less than thirty years, the child’s presence is particularly effective at emphasizing just how short that timeframe is. Later, though, when ‘We are together because…’ reaches fever pitch, with percussion, hand-claps, and the urgent shriek of a whistle, there is a fleeting shot of the baby, entranced by the maraca swimming in and out of its view. Doom is difficult to keep at the forefront of one’s mind in the face of an image that contains such overwhelming joy. This feels emblematic of Karikis’ attitude towards the climate emergency in Songs for the Storm to Come. Never shrinking from the scale of the catastrophe, the piece is nevertheless shot through with hope, earnestly insisting that ways forward exist, and that we might find them together. Yes, here is an eaten-away Britain, here are cries of woe, and pain, and frustration—but here, too, is a community looking after one another. Tenderness extends not only between them, but outward to the viewer as well. And here is a baby; here is a maraca. The machine-noises made by the breath of the choir might well bring to mind jet engines and their ceaseless pollution, but it is worth remembering that when Oliveros noticed the sounds participants in one of her Sonic Meditation workshops made sounded like aeroplanes, she dubbed the exercise ‘teaching yourself to fly.’ The storm to come is daunting, Karikis suggests, but if we try, together, we are capable of impossible things. We could survive. We could fly.
Mikhail Karikis, Songs for the Storm to Come, HOME, Manchester, 12 October 2024 – 2 February 2025.
Jack Nicholls is a writer living in Manchester.
This review is supported by HOME.
Published 24.01.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,423 words