A sound installation built around recordings of bats and radio signals captured near British military antennae in Cyprus opens at Thkio Ppalies on Friday, October 16.
‘Routine Maintenance: A Tale’ is a sculptural sound environment by Lower Levant Company, the duo of Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian, and Olga Micińska. Its title comes from a statement by the Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) authorities on work at Akrotiri Salt Lake, where locals are protesting against plans for as many as 68 new communications antennae, which they call “antennae of death”. According to the statement, any work under way is “associated with routine maintenance” and not with plans to install new listening antennae.
The exhibition brings together two existing works. ‘Crossover Frequency Spectrum’ (2024), made by Lower Levant Company with Gaetano di Gregorio, was shown at the Cyprus Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. ‘Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad luck to Every Gamekeeper’ (2026), by Lower Levant Company and Micińska, was presented at the Sonic Acts Biennial in Amsterdam.
The installation combines whistles and crackles captured from the ionosphere near RAF antennae, an imaginary radio transmission from a historic number station and recordings of bat calls. In ‘Crossover Frequency Spectrum’, repurposed audiophile speaker horns shaped like plants, which the organisers say resemble a surveillance system, filter the sound by frequency, inviting listeners to tune in to frequencies that are often present, and even extremely loud, but not easily heard. Clay replicas of the horns, handmade by ceramicist and architect di Gregorio, rise from a bed of copper slag.
‘Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad luck to Every Gamekeeper’ turns models of artificial bat houses into sound sculptures, imagining bat colonies reclaiming the land around the British bases. It uses recordings made over seven years: a lone common pipistrelle flying near RAF Akrotiri in Asomatos, a colony living in La Cabaña, the Spanish-built fortress in Havana, and Mexican free-tailed bats at the Bracken Cave Preserve in Texas. According to the organisers, the Texas site is the world’s largest concentration of mammals, where 20 million bats roost every year before crossing the Mexican border with their young.
The exhibition reworks both pieces with new sculptural additions and a forthcoming record release. According to the organisers, it raises questions about Cyprus’s history of transmission and its role as an ‘antenna island’ in the region, which they say implicates it in what they describe as the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the US-Israel war with Iran. It also addresses the environmental impact of the British bases in Cyprus, questioning ideas such as ‘ecologies of care’ in the face of growing militarism, continuing colonial presence and what the organisers call irreversible ecological catastrophe.
The exhibition runs until November 6. The opening is at 7pm on October 16, and it is open Wednesday to Friday from 6pm to 8pm, or by appointment.
