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. The work can be signed out at the Library reception desk and listened to in any available space within the library. 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 present their campus card.

The work cannot be taken out of the Library.

Competition

To celebrate Deep Recovery being at the University, we are hosting a student competition with a cash prize of £150 for the best creative response to the work.

More information about the competition can be found here on the LU Arts website.

 

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 (b.1987, Cornwall) lives and works in West Penwith. She is a multidisciplinary artist drawing on her British-Cornish-Namibian heritage to make discursive works that explore the entangled personal histories, and colonial legacies inscribed in the body and land. Sibungu employs sound, performance, photography, and installation — as a way to usher subversive pathways into the present through reimagining materiality, movement, and collective healing in relation to the environment. 

Sibungu is the recipient of both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Future Foundation awards (2022). Selected exhibitions have been with; Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2023); Sonsbeek, Netherlands, and Temple Bar Gallery, Ireland, (2021); Gasworks, London, and Spike Island, Bristol, (2019).