The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures

The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures is an installation-opera that reanimates the songs of long-extinct creatures – including a Mammoth Imperator, an Entelodont and an Ambulocetus ‘walking whale’ – through the reconstruction of their voices. During her research, Marguerite discovered that reconstructing their voices poses a particular challenge: hardly any information exists because vocal tracts mainly comprise soft tissue and, unable to withstand fossilisation, instead decompose. While the bone structure surrounding the vocal tract could by and large be faithfully re-created, the fleshy tissue, along with the sounds it produced, had to be re-imagined. Working with palaeontologists, veterinarians, engineers, radiologists, ear and throat specialists and voice engineers, Marguerite sought to revive never-before-heard sounds lost to a timespan of millions of years through The Opera, a work of collective speculation. In it, bone-white sculptures on high stilts are equipped with vibrating vocal cords set in motion by compressed air. These creatures are engaged in an exchange of call, response and mimicry, and their languages co-evolve and complexify as the exhibition progresses with the help of artificial intelligence. Understanding language as an open-ended, living process rather than a fixed or inherent one, The Opera bridges a gap left by physical extinction with a virtual form of communication, crossing a vast span of time. This early work lays the ground for the essential qualities that will come to characterise Marguerite’s work: that of combining extensive research with speculation to presence the absent or extinct – a practice at the limit of what imagination deems possible.