Micha Hamel & Jonas Staal: Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate

Het Noordbrabants Museum and November Music present Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate, a newly commissioned musical composition and large-scale immersive installation by composer Micha Hamel and artist Jonas Staal that honours human and non-human Earth Workers across deep pasts, presents and futures.    

Hamel’s musical composition, inspired by geological epochs, features a six-hour electronic score interwoven with live instrumental and vocal interventions. The accompanying visual installation, where the durational music piece is performed, comprises a fossil landscape formed by pyramids of motor oil and ammonite fossils—representing the earth’s ancient past—and woven banners depicting rare life forms that thrive in climate catastrophe, which will become the impoverished fossil archives of the future. 

Human animals are not the only labourers on Earth—nonhuman animals, plants and bacteria work, too. This collective labour has created a liveable biosphere over millennia. As writer Radha D’Souza notes, we are all earth workers. The intricate sonic layers of Hamel’s composition, combined with Staal’s fossils of past and future earth workers, seek to honour these beings across various temporalities. As an expansion of the final line of the Communist Manifesto, the piece calls for unity not only among workers of all lands, but also of workers across all times.

Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate commemorates (requiem) and celebrates (jubilate) our collective past and future as earth workers during this critical moment for our ecosystems—where our collective extinction has been turned into a profit model for the elites of fossil capitalism. It serves as a rallying cry for earth workers of all times to unite in the struggle for a regenerated biosphere—a sphere of life—for all. 

Micha Hamel (Netherlands) is a composer, poet, theatre maker and researcher. He composed two operas and a great number of interdisciplinary music theatre performances. Also, he writes poetry, essays and scripts for VR. 

Jonas Staal (Netherlands) is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. With lawyer Radha D’Souza he co-founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. His latest book is Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (MIT Press, 2024). 

Installation with live performers 
November 9–17, 2024, November Music, location: Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands 

Installation without performers 
November 19, 2024–March 9, 2025, Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands 

Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate is a co-production of November Music and Het Noordbrabants Museum. The production is financially supported by Het Cultuurfonds Noord-Brabant, the Mondriaan Fund, Fonds Podiumkunsten, the Société Gavigniès Foundation, the Konrad Boehmer Foundation and the Reinbert de Leeuw Foundation.