Call for Submissions: Soundscapes of Global Pandemia
Hello everyone; I write my first blog post amidst a global pandemic and a global uprising in response to systemic racial inequality…
During the quarantine, my graduate studies and creative projects have served as an outlet to remain connected with the community outside of my isolation bubble. Currently, I am grappling with how to utilize my artistic and organizing efforts to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement beyond the realm of UCLA and in the context of my local and global community. One question I return to is, “How can art and collaborative research design engage critically with the current historic moment?”
How can art and collaborative research design engage critically with the current historic moment?
The past few weeks we have witnessed civil unrest in response to the public murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota by the hands of police. George Floyd’s, along with countless other deaths are a part of the U.S. 400 year legacy of racial inequality and as a result an uprising standing for the rights of black people in the United States has erupted worldwide. Here, in Los Angeles, denizens have been advocating for The People’s Budget, which is a call to defund the police and to invest in community solutions for the aforementioned racial and class issues.
Throughout the global pandemic and uprising, I have continued to work on a collaborative project with my dear friends and colleagues Nylsa and Adam from the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. We asked our extended networks to source sound clips from their respective environments to create a collective memory-scape. This is based on the idea that archival material is something that is performed; thus in considering the multi-modal experience of this moment, we document and interpret ephemeral strata that is often over-looked in the formalized and institutional archival record. In a way, our project is curatorial and alchemical, as we synthesize the emergent quality collective memory and a possible future.
The project titled “Soundscapes of Pandemia,” was conceived just before the uprising as an effort to address the collective quarantine experience as a portal; the portal being one of a liminal state between the fast-paced metropolitan vitality and an emerging post-quarantine social order. This project was also inspired by the prompt provided by the Urban Humanities Initiative call for a digital salon podcast.
Our soundscape project asks an international body of collaborators to record soundscapes that illustrate their currently changing relationship to their urban environment in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. We will ask our collaborators to consider the soundscape as a portal through which we gain insight to the ways various living organisms, landscapes and built environments are currently afforded different interactions. Our team will utilize a surrealist intervention by arranging the collected soundscapes into an interactive experience that illustrates different environments formed by post-humanist conceptions of communities that are portals to wider networks, allowing more engagement and exchange of ideas for an unfolding future.
The image of the dog–taken from the Florentine Codex–has been adapted by Adam to signify the passing of one life into another. In Nahuatl cosmology, the dog is a guardian and guide through the after-life.
My own icon–which I call Cacique– is derived from a collage of a photograph of a West Mexican (Colima) funerary ceramic of a dog wearing a human-face mask. The halo I have placed around the dog is derived from Catholic iconography, representing the collaging of indigenous West Mexican culture and Spanish culture. In West Mexican cosmology, it is known that the dog awaits for you in the afterlife. If you have misbehaved in your mortality, the dog will bite you, but this fate can be avoided if you give the dog a tortilla.
The dog also has a role in the soundscape as an actor who is our companion as we move through the liminal space of sonic change: where we reflect on our moribund systems and movement towards reimagined futurity.
So far, we have received submissions from Sao Paulo, Brazil; Leipzig, Germany; San Francisco, California; Los Angeles, California. We are grateful and excited to collage all of our sonic experiences together.
Our aim is to make this project accessible to a multi-linguistic audience through the use of graphics, sounds, texts and ThickMapping, a methodology we utilize in the field of urban humanities. If you would like to submit a soundscape, we will be accepting clips until June 19th.
Our project will officially launch to the public on June 30th.
For inquiries, please feel free to contact me!
