The exhibition tenders an approach to notes (accounts, notation, inscriptions, reminders) as creative impressions that are in process of becoming, that are being read. Notes also refers to (graphic) scores, musical notations and instruction as creative forms that propel knowledge and action into the future. These notes are coupled with an understanding of the below as that which is beneath – the quiet, inaudible yet present.

Each of the artists are guided by processes of translation, encoding, and transcription that demonstrate how inherited forms and traditions inform lineages, yet are unstable and open to change and adaptation. Their works demonstrate a myriad of approaches to how history, memory and knowledge can be cast across generations and geographies. From ancestral methods of care and manufacture, language as a mutable form, gestural communication of bees, to graphic notations and scores for the casting and transfer of practices, Notes from Below asks for us to look and listen closer to the cultural and epistemic transfers that occur on micro and macro levels, in personal and communal spaces.

Gilles Aubry presents a selection from an on-going body of collaborative research on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. Aubry digs into the significance of seaweed in the region as a resource for industries to harvest, and a material around which social and cultural life revolves for local communities in Sidi Bouzid. Together with a number of interlocutors, Aubry collectively attempts to “listen” to seaweed and pollution on the Atlantic coast.