The ants' cry

While the bricklayer's skin and brain roast in the midday sun, under which he is cementing the tree pit from which the town hall has snatched another tree, the rentier has an overpriced coffee on the terrace that occupies the sidewalk (impassable and with shadows from sponsored umbrellas). Suddenly, she grimaces and, without taking her eyes off her phone, hyperbolically laments the footballers who in a couple of hours, under the scorching star, will have to play a match. This individual of the human species lives an existence so parallel, so separate from ours, that she neither sees nor hears the protest procession (at 49 degrees without shade) of the peregarauinian associations. Nor does the expat from the other bar hear or see it, who, with his gaze fixed on his laptop, his ears plugged with headphones, and his neurons in the paid cloud, inhabits yet another universe.

The worker is not alone, and the peregarauinians are a group; however, it seems that we have lost the possibility of communicating: as if we had unlearned or not sufficiently organically adapted human sound codes – as if we no longer shared them. Meanwhile, we coexist with neighbors blinded and deafened by their own well-being and with rulers firmly determined to ignore us and belittle our logical demands: either they pass by our presence and noise, or they interpret us as a threat to their status and silence us. But our counter-proposal makes sense and has consensus, there are mirrors and echoes in all the Balearic Islands... and beyond. In a residential district of Berlin, the city council has also decided to cut down the trees that cooled the apartment buildings, so that residents of houses with gardens have space for their two cars. This is explained to us by the sound artist Kirsten Reese, professor of electroacoustic composition at the University of the Arts in Berlin (a city she describes as "the concrete mixer"), with whom we went to the Vosges (a mountain range in Alsace) to listen to and record not the desolate echoes of cement, but the collective vibration of formicids.

Ants do not communicate by 'talking' as we do, meaning they do not have organs equivalent to our vocal cords or eardrums that allow them to send and receive sounds through the air. Instead, they are capable of stridulating (rubbing parts of their bodies together) and drumming their mandibles against various surfaces, in order to transmit all sorts of messages in rhythmic codes that individuals of their species (and very possibly of other species) perceive as a vibration that is conducted through the leaves of vegetation, through the underground tunnels they build, or through the ground, for example. It is difficult to imagine, then, that they can say anything to each other amidst so much asphalt, cement, and concrete. Enric Casasses, like other poets, listened to them with his bare ear, when they entered (through the clothesline without clothes on) an uninhabited house in Empordà: “Neither day nor night do they make noise / but they all speak to each other. / They have a few languages: / that of hand signs, / that of grimaces, / that of spitting, burping, sighing, and farting, / that of telling each other by dancing / and that of rubbing cheek to cheek, which is a language / of very rich vocabulary”.

While in Mallorca we continue to watch over the protection of Trenc and the pollinating ants of the limonium, GOB Menorca has also chosen this insect as the symbol of a new campaign against the current modus vivendi. Its coordinator argues why it inspires us to a transformation that is neither destructive nor re-hierarchizing: it is not necessary to tear everything down led by a leader, but rather to implement changes (all the small and powerful changes) that alleviate today's problems (saturation, housing, water...), immediately and without waiting for the creation of legal frameworks that authorize them, nor the government of a political party that validates them.

At the foot of a giant anthill, in a clearing that should have been damp, the four immobile sapiens (despite the mosquitoes) were silent and listened. Technology helped us amplify the sound, and we heard (both understandable and mysterious at the same time) the language of these insects. We noted that, if they are disturbed (by blocking a nest entrance with the microphone), their stridulationis translatable to the reverberating unease of our cry. But, with the landscape enlarged, the echo of a timeless suffering also roared, akin to those who entrenched themselves in those forests during the First and Second World Wars, and we heard it: as clear as the third war, which is not fought in a parallel universe, and as clear as the consequences (human and natural, planetary). We have not been silenced, nor are we alone – we have only confused the cry. Instead of that of the bewildered and impotent human, we should resonate the cry of the ants: the one that, through a network of whispers, calls to knock down parasols and replant trees together.