Deep Recovery at Pilkington Library
We are hosting a sound artwork on campus alongside a student competition for the best creative response to the work.
For one month, Libita Sibungu’s Radar commissioned work Deep Recovery (2023) will be located at Pilkington Library on the Loughborough University campus. Students, staff and members of the public are invited to experience the work between 9am and 5pm weekdays only.
Deep Recovery comprises a sound work and risograph publication housed in an archival box. Visitors can sign the work out at the Library reception desk, and listen to it in any library space available. We recommend a quiet space or study room.
Members of the public are able to access the library for this event but in order to comply with library regulations, please bring photo ID with you. Under 18s should be accompanied by an adult but will not require their own photo ID. Students and staff will need to show their campus card.
To celebrate Deep Recovery being at the University, we are running a student competition with a cash prize of £150 for the best creative response to the work.
Deep Recovery student competition details
About Deep Recovery
Deep Recovery (2023) by Libita Sibungu is a sonic fragment comprising a sound work and small risograph publication housed in a bespoke archival box fabricated by Rhea Evers. The work is designed to be sited in archival spaces and experienced as an intimate act of listening.
Responding to a research visit to the British Geological Survey archives in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, as well as the narratives told about granite in the artist’s home of West Cornwall, Sibungu’s work questions the colonial logic of archiving: what is determined worth storing, what becomes erased, and whose perspectives are valued. Deep Recovery plays with the form of an archival object whilst existing as an unruly sonic fragment, a trace of embodied knowledge.
The work was developed through a series of workshops led by the artist together with a group of mixed heritage women artists* living in West Cornwall, walking in the granite-rich landscape, visiting sites of geological significance, and making field recordings, before later translating these embodied experiences to language, improvisation and collective reflection. The resulting sound work includes excerpts of these field recordings alongside poetic scripts written by the artist and performed by the women involved.
Acting as a counter narrative to the stories told of the permanence, solidity and endurance of the granite landscape, and its connection to a particular idea of Britishness, Deep Recovery instead invites us to see the impermanence of geological forms: the mineral rich veins and cracks which weave quartz and black tourmaline through the granite landscape, and the nature of the granite itself as coming from the sea, destined to erode. Alongside the fluidity which characterises the landscape is a renewed understanding of who belongs to the land, and how our own stories attach to our environments.
*Vocal contributions by the unruly artists, singers, writers, healers, mothers: Maria Christoforidou, Caroline Deeds, Catherine Lucktaylor and Angeline Morrison.
Deep Recovery was commissioned by Radar, Loughborough University’s contemporary art programme. It has been produced with support from Liz Howell. Sound produced by SJ Blackmore at Cling Clack Studios.
About Libita Sibungu
Libita Sibungu is a multidisciplinary artist based in West Cornwall, where she grew up with Namibian and English parents. ‘Quantum Ghost’ is Sibungu’s most recent and ambitious body of work - a lament to memory, following the trace of the artist's late fathers’ journey through exile in the 1980’s from Namibia to West Cornwall by way of mining. The work comprises a multi-channel audio installation and series of photograms and was presented as a solo exhibition with Gasworks and Spike Island in 2019. Sibungu is the 2022 Arts Foundation Future Award winner and Rolex Protege nominated artist. In 2020 Sibungu received the Henry Moore Foundation and Paul Hamlyn Award. She joined the Syllabus IV cohort in 2019. Sibungu is currently working on a series of new commissions with the Bristol Beacon and Bristol Music Trust and Hospital Rooms (UK) and will be in residence with the Newlyn Art Gallery and Exchange in partnership with Jerwood Arts later this year. Projects and performances of note have been presented with; Sonsbeek, Netherlands, and Temple Bar Gallery, Ireland (2021); Somerset House (UK) and Cabaret Voltaire, Switzerland, (2019); Eastside Projects (UK) and Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2018); South London Gallery and Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Accessibility
There is step-free access into the Library and lift access across all floors.