The audio series “Speaking to the Ghosts of Kaliyuga,” reflects on collective societal crises in embodied ways; interwoven in soundscapes based field recordings of urban and rural (work) environments. As a tool for orientation in confusing times, each episode offers specifically chosen somatic exercises for grounding and for deepening the bodymind awareness in the face of the many aspects of humanity’s current crises.

The starting point for my artistic exploration of embodied thinking was, in 2017, my social observation that although we have long known how much our “Western,” more precisely colonial, patriarchal, dominant way of life exploits the Earth and all its species, as one of these species, we nevertheless seem largely unable to change this situation.

Based on empirical self-observation, my hypothesis was that knowledge and will must be experienced in an embodied way in order to take effect. But the Cartesian separation of body and mind is so deeply anchored in our lived reality that this idea shapes our perceived reality. It prevents us, in many ways (education system, working conditions, beauty ideals, etc.), from perceiving, valuing, and celebrating our bodies with all their feelings and needs. The economic ideologies of neoliberalism and the current tech-feudalism are concepts that build on and sustain this Cartesian split, thus serving as instruments of domination. They did not emerge from the material and cyclical conditions of our earthly reality, but at the desks and podiums of patriarchally privileged individuals who were—and still are—far more concerned with maintaining the comfort of privileged classes than with the viability of the Earth and its inhabitants.

The ancient Indian philosophical concept of the world’s cyclical ages frames these audio essays as a confrontational set of questions: What would the spirits of our age of decline, wars, and discord—Kaliyuga—say? Who are these spirits—might they be ourselves? If so, from which perspective are we speaking—have we, after the inevitable collapse, returned to the first, golden age of unity? And if so, how? How does life develop after the death of the patriarchal ruling economy?

In the first episode of this work-in-progress series, “rainset,” the waters pour forth in multiple ways. Polyphonic, lamenting choirs and reinterpreted fragments of familiar melodies interrupt a flow of thought that culminates in a bodily exploration of money flows as a force that could connect humanity — but nowadays mostly divides it.

In April 2026, this first part was hosted by the New Zealand Audio Foundation in their streaming service AFM under “Unframed Signals,” still available in their archive:
https://afm.org.nz/STEPHANIE-HANNA-SPEAKING-TO-THE-GHOSTS-OF-KALIYUGA

The following episodes are in the making…