I.

The eyes have eyelids, the ears do not close.

They can’t; the inner ear holds a small fluid-filled cavity – the cochlea – that, together with the vestibular apparatus, is essential for equilibrium and how we sense the world. It helps us navigate our environment and maintain stability in motion. To hear is to balance. Listening is equilibrium.

Equilibrium is survival.

II.

The eye of the storm is a region of calm weather at the centre of a cyclone, a circular area, surrounded by an “eyewall”, a ring of towering thunderstorms.

I am in a morgue in Berlin in 2024. I am in the eye of the storm.

I look up and see, written in German: “BITTE RUHE (Please be quiet).”

It is quiet as I prepare to enter Oceanic Refractions. It is quiet in the eye of the storm.

The ears do not close.

III.

I enter the installation. It is housed in the Kuppelhalle, the mourning hall of the morgue.

Above and around the installation screens, a columbarium houses a series of small storage spaces built for funerary urns which house cremated remains of the dead.

The term “columbarium” comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for birds.

There are no birds in this columbarium, and no urns, either. Instead, we hear testimonies of Fijian, i-Kiribati, and Papua New Guinean elders while the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean refracts onto the empty urn holders. This morgue is under water. The mourning here is liquid.

Since 2012, the morgue has been called silent green. The couple who bought the property and turned it into a cultural institution explained to a Berlin-based magazine⁠1 the reason behind the name: “After we bought [the morgue], we were sitting on the grass outside and thinking about where we were. It’s silent, it’s green… silent green.”

To listen is, first and foremost, to imagine.

What kind of silence is this?

IV.

There are many faces of silence.

Silence under torture is bravery; under injustice, cowardice. It can signify death – a body no longer breathes – and it can signify life: they stared at each other in silence. It can be heard in the tranquility of a newborn, the stillness of a lake, the respect for an elder, the devotion of a ritual, the incommensurability of the night sky. There is an eerie silence after destruction. There is the silence of grief.⁠2 The silence of a tomb and the double silence of an unmarked tomb.

As waters rise and entire relational webs are forced silent in the Pacific and elsewhere, the autopsy reveals the silence of complicity, of greed. The silence of laissez-faire. An air-conditioned office building. A stale courtroom. Datasheets. Profit margins.

V.

Can we autopsy the world?

“It’s silent, it’s green… Silent Green.”⁠3

What places have to be loud for here to be so quiet?

What places have to flood for here to be so dry?

These are the questions we ask from the eye of the storm, or rather, the ear of the storm, this ear which looks out onto that ring of towering thunderstorms and high winds.

From this city, this morgue, from these ashes that are no longer here and from this silence that I struggle to hear as silence, I think of what the Pacific elders say: We have one mouth but two ears.

What kind of attentiveness is needed? How urgent is a space for listening?

Enough podiums; we need an entire urn to hold this listening as it once may have held a million ashes, a million stories, a million warnings, a million other listenings. We must autopsy the world.

Autopsy, from αὐτός (self) and ὀπτός (seen; visible). Learning the cause of death as seeing-the-self.

The pathologist whispers: “It is impossible to hold an autopsy after cremation.”

And yet we still enter the urn of the world as ashes do and we listen with the attentiveness of an ear that has no mouth to account for it. It is a free ear. Held in equilibrium.

There is an island of listening outside of enunciation. Survival speaks from the crevices of our inner ear: “Do not flood it with more words: it is already a flood of silence.”

VI.

What kind of silence do we need to be able to autopsy the world?

To listen is, first and foremost, to imagine.

The ears do not close. Imagination does not sleep. A politics that stems from listening is a politics of imagination. A politics of the unseen, from the unseen: the inner ear, of the world.