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Atlantic Sound Cartographies
Leandra LambertDOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.56698/filigrane.683
Résumés
Abstract
The present paper is a result of an artistic on-going process - the "Atlântica" series - and the reflections that it produces. It started with some of my experiences with attentive/deep listening, field recordings, photography, drawings, texts, interventions, and other media in urban and non-urban environments in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In these milieus, updated issues from the ecosophy in "The Three Ecologies", by Guattari, stand out in an intense and multiple manner. The environment, the social relations, and the human subjectivity — all these entries are under great pressure, tension and conflict in this Atlantic space. The series began as a free form of soundwalk that induces to a state of "derangement of all senses". This state directs and defines all the work that is produced in this project. Deleuze, in “Critique et Clinique”, speaks of a cartography-art made not from static maps, but pathways, routes; the soundwalks that I execute and the traces left by them are a kind of cartography of environments, composed of many changing layers. This practice had leaded to some outgrowths and to the elaboration of some notions, experiences and methods, such as: experienced fictions, sonic met-hodology, phantasmal listening, imaginative pansensorial wandering, memory-fiction, cartographic listening, and plastic palimpsest of space-times.
Texte intégral
Presentation: "Atlântica"
1The present work is a result of an artistic on-going process and the theoretical reflection that it produces. It started with some of my experiences with attentive/deep listening (in the terms of Pauline Oliveros, 2005) and field recordings in urban and non-urban environments in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Atlântica series began as a free form of soundwalk, in some aspects related to the work of Hildegard Westerkamp (2007). I have been conducting these intersensory drifts since 2009, soundwalks that induce to a state of "derangement of all senses", in the words of Arthur Rimbaud — and with a resemblance with the situationist dérive/détournement. This state directs and defines all the work that is produced in this project. Deleuze, in “Critique et Clinique”, speaks of a cartography-art made not from static maps, but pathways, routes; the soundwalks that I execute are a kind of sound cartography of some specific environments.
These soundwalks are realized in three environments that I call “As Três Atlânticas” (The Three Atlantics): the Atlantic Ocean, vast liquid border between Brazil, the Europe of the Portuguese colonizers and the Africa of the slaved people brought here in the most deplorable conditions; the Atlantic Forest, a rich environment already largely devastated - and where a large portion of our original indigenous populations is exterminated, since the beginning of the colonization of the country; and the Avenida Atlântica (Atlantic Avenue), in Copacabana, an urban area that chaotically gathers some of the most diverse relevant elements of our History. The specific territory of the avenue is always in a flux of fast transformations. There is a vivid relation between this space and the countless mixed trajectories that pervade it, in a continuous reconfiguration of places and non-places.
In these environments, updated issues from the ecosophy in The Three Ecologies, by Guattari, stand out in an intense and multiple manner. The environment, the social relations, and the human subjectivity — all these entries are under great pressure, tension and conflict in this Atlantic space. There's exuberance, beauty and some solar lightness in these scenarios, but the fact is that heaviness, decay and destruction are also present. This Atlantic space - especially the avenue - is rich in anti-monuments that are testimonies of everyday tactics and daily wreckages, related to Robert Smithson's notion of "ruins in reverse". These are spaces and constructions on which destruction has been acting since the beginning: they "don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built"(R. Smithson, 2001: p. 46). The landscape looks, at the same time, like a postcard and like a "destructive postcard" (id.ibid: p. 46), in a see-saw effect that constitutes two of the many possible layers of this living landscape-environment.
As Félix Guattari highlights, there is an intricate interdependence between different strata of the planetary reality. There's a sense of urgency in seeking the necessary changes. Human subjectivity, social relations and the environment constitutes one another, in countless dynamic crossings: a collapse in one strata implies collapses in the other stratas; and if something is changed in one strata, the other stratas are also altered.
2I have lived near these three Atlantic spaces all my life until now. They are familiar, they are the environments that have mostly contributed to the constitution of my subjectivity - and they are in permanent crisis, in a borderline state since I know them. I seek to listen, see, feel, and think these places with a renewed astonishment. I also seek to act in these milieus as an eventual factor of micro-changings. Poetics and politics of otherness, difference and strangeness are present in these experiences of a living environment, in a complex and emergent ecosophy.
I try to experiment these places through art in many different ways, using mixed media, like sound and written poetry, field recordings, experimental music, performance, objects, photography, and drawing. All the process emphasizes the relationship between listening, intersensoriality, imagination and memory; the entwinement between what is physically listened and the “non-cochlear” sounds; the resonances created by the mix of acoustic spaces and sonic reveries.I explore the connections between concept and concrete and between history, stories and myths, in a non-realistic account of events, trying to produce an art linked to everyday life and fabulation in mingled ways, composing experienced fictions.
In a mix of the spaces of the avenue, ocean, and forest, I experiment with detours, semantic and material displacements, and the trade of elements from diverse surroundings. Different people, places and times are gathered in layers of sound, meaning, and experience. I investigate different kinds of walks and activities around the shoreline, the port activity, the relation of people with the ocean, the exchanges with strangers. As an outgrowth of the project, I plan to make two crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, following the reversed routes of the colonization: from Brazil to Portugal and from Brazil to Africa, in cargo ships or in sailboats. This relation with the history of the violent colonization of Brazil and the Americas has a kind of disrupted continuity of the Atlantic as the major route of western capitalism – especially the North Atlantic – that must be remembered. Its fluid, vast and violent territory is the main transit space for fluxes of capital and information, flights and marine navigation: the ways that lead to Europe and North America are replete of all kinds of commerce and exchange, from art to military gear.
3It is also interesting to point the common origin of the words nausea/nausée, nautical/nautique, and noise (in English and in Old French). They all came from the latin nauseam, derived from the greek naus (Y. Tone, 2001: p. 101).The notion of noise is related to the nautical roots, to the sickness of seafaring, and to the intense sound of the seas, the waves - and sounds are, in fact, waves, while the sea produces what we call white noise. This relation between nautical, nausea and noise is another field to be explored.
At this point, it can be said that the soundwalks I did in the beginning are growing into something else, into bigger projects and countless possibilities. Before this, they were already transformed into something different from soundwalking: they turned into "drifts of the senses", including synaesthetic states and the pursuit of experiences to instigate intersensoriality. They were expanded towards an imaginative pansensorial wandering, in which senses, memory, imagination, movements, times and spaces are blended into an inextricable compound.
4I like to experience all these movements as a cartographic dance I take part in, seeking to create collections of sounds, images, substances, and objects from the streets; and I interfere with some sounds and leave in the streets some objects, images, and texts. My solo exhibition in 2013 was called "Danças Atlânticas" (Atlantic Dances - see examples 1, 2, 3). A detailed account of these practices and the methodology employed - a sonic met-hodology - has been described in a paper called Experienced Sonic Fictions, in the fourth edition of Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture1. Considering this, in the present paper I will focus on some reflections that took shape during the development of these practices.
Example 1. "The morning, when it comes, is never the same - Ocean". Photos (35mm film) printed in various papers, salt, seawater. Solo exhibition "Danças Atlânticas", CCJF, Rio. Leandra Lambert, 2013.
Example 2. "The street from the inside - What has no value". Text written on the ground, photo (35mm film B&W), drawing. "Danças Atlânticas", Leandra Lambert, 2013.
Example 3. "About time and the city - I". Objects, substances, acrylic showcase, typewritten text in old paper. Leandra Lambert, 2011. Text: From left to right, from back to front: 1. Smoke from the rush hour of Friday; 2. Wet sand from this morning; 3. Sound of the last New Year's Day fireworks; 4. Air of melancholy from a cloudy afternoon; 5. Blow of a carnival drum; 6. Effluvia of hot asphalt in January; 7. Sea spray in a summer dawn; 8. Perfume of night girls passing by; 9. Undertow at the nocturnal sea; 10. Sea water after too much sun; 11. Crystal of a finger in the water; 12. Cap for an oblivion; 13. Egg of little mermaid; 14. The last gasp of a fish; 15. Block of ocean. Solo exhibition "Danças Atlânticas", Rio de Janeiro, 2013.
Listening, speech, and fiction in a plastic palimpsest of space-times
Storytelling at the shores
5The artistic on-going process is based on a subjective and open mapping of experiences, places, and times. There is no intention to cover and define everything in the path. It is an intimate cartography, with political and poetic relations to the public spaces, history, culture, and myths. It comes from walked paths and personal narratives, from drifts, wanderings, reveries, detours: these cartographies are made of maps to be lost. These drifts are made of crossings, trespassings and contaminations, maps-reports that follow down the interstices and shores, through this third place: “Where the map marks, the report makes a crossing”(M. de Certeau, 2008: p. 215). These are story-maps in movement and in transformation, plastic compounds of walking traces, a drawing made by walking inside the landscape. It is also a cartography where "the drawings articulate spatializing practices [...] not 'geographic maps', but 'story books'".”(id.ibid: p. 206). These books are composed of unexpected findings, of blends, and of dives: "the art of let yourself soak in the landscape to aprehend it, to see it in its combinations" (M. Onfray, 2009: p.106).
This kind of experience of the landscape is not a visual contemplation: it is a sensual, trans-sensual and imaginative immersion in a live landscape, in a complex environment.It is a kind of knowledge that is realized when surrounded by things, not in front of things. According to Michel Serres: "Knowing things requires us to place ourselves among them. Not just in front, to see them, but in the middle of their mixture, in the paths between them" (M. Serres, 2001: p.76).
The intense perception of the placecan build intricate stories in a complex time-space cartography, considering the intimate relation between narrative and space. According to Certeau, narratives permeate and organize places: they select and gather places in one set, making phrases and itineraries from them; narratives are a practice of space (M. de Certeau, 2008: p. 199-200).
6 I am interested in a partial and incomplete stream of actions and fabulations; a dynamic and polyphonic stream that privileges chance, the unpredictable sounds, gestures, and speech of those who inhabit such spaces, what they have to say, to propose. There is a need to be open to casual conversations, contacts, approaches - and conflicts.
In this Atlantic space, the speech draws distinctive webs in countless languages, accents, slangs, and regionalisms.Fragments of voices and spontaneous conversations can be mixed with narratives and ambient sounds to compose sonic fictions. I am especially interested in accents, in the musicality of voices, objects and spaces, and in the stories and tales people tell about the places they live, work, imagine, and would like to know.
From these experiences and reflections I get a renewed will to work with voices and speeches as narrative builders, acting as performative fictions, and capable of being productive space makers. Narratives can also be related to a re-activation and even the invention of different times. The concept of time I prefer is that of Deleuze, a complex and rizomatic time, which can be accessed like a space, a place, a moldable surface, a tissue, a contexture. It is not the kind of time to be experienced in daily affairs, but it can be accessible in many ways, including music, art, drifts, reveries, soundwalks... Peter Pál Pelbart, in his thesis about time in Deleuze works, offers many bright insights about it, among them:
"Art, in its turn, has the privilege of going through the ages in the mass of time, dodging the present and preventing, as Deleuze says, the past from degrading in remembrance. Then the past, instead, becomes hallucinatory, paradoxical, hypnotic, always coming. This way, we may arrive to the extreme of this notion of time, wherein the past is catapulted into the future. For this is not a past to be discovered, but to be invented according to the outspread it is submitted and that will place it in an unsuspected bundle of relationships. We would say that time, as open raw material, is like a mass to be constantly molded, or modulated, stretched, crushed, compressed, fluidized, densified, superimposed, divided, extended, etc." (P. Pelbart, 2012: p.19-20)
City Ghosts
7Another constitutive way to create and listen to fictions that appeared in my practices is the phantasmal listening. In places where history seems to be lost and the memory is buried, I try to listen to other times in that space and to perceive the ghostly traces of the experiences in that place — it is always fictitious, albeit linked to possibilities and historical passages. Who lived there, who passed through there, which people were forgotten and dead, who survived but did not tell the story, what was hidden, repressed, oppressed, what may erupt as a fabling force: it is about to imagine possible realities through fiction and to give voice and body to unfathomable traces. This kind of phantasmal listening and fictional construction based on history reports is linked to the notion of open history, by Walter Benjamin. The future is open to multiple possibilities, nothing is totally determined; but thepast is also open, as it can be reviewed, altered, transformed (M. Löwy, 2012: p. 147-159). History as could be told by the defeated, by those who did not survive to tell it: this is the origin of these ghosts and these fictions. These narratives are not necessarily linked to great historical events, but to possible daily experiences, to the intimate life, to lonely memories. As said by Jacques Rancière:
"Private and public, past and present, the psychic and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. An intimacy that questions the binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These spheres of life are linked by an interspaced temporality that takes the action of dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history." (J.Rancière, 2012: p.35)
8The trivial event, the fortuitous episode, the everyday incident: the banality of situations can keep layers of meanings deeply connected to questions of history and the tragedy of the post-colonial reality; "...it is precisely in those platitudes that strangeness moves" (J. Rancière, 2012: p.37). The Foucault's collection of "lives of infamous men" and of "dry legends of obscure men" shows that everyday trivialities can touch the absurd when crossed by power. Foucault seeks to "rediscover something like these lightning-existences, these poems-lives" (M. Foucault, 2012: p. 201)
These dry and dark legends, these small misunderstandings of the real and the fictional, of the said and the interdict, are made not of tradition, but of "breaks, erasure, forgetfulness, cancellations, reappearances." (M. Foucault, 2012: p. 205) In addition to these legends collected in the French archives of the absolutist era, one can consider that all that has been repressed, blocked, hidden, forbidden to show and say can also become a black legend and gain some body, some sense and some speech in the imaged materializations of art, of fiction.
Every place is an archive, every place is historical, every place has its memory: as much as this history has been deleted from space, as much as the demolitions, cover ups, amnesias and lack of inscriptions silence what was once alive and real, the place can be perceived as aplastic palimpsest of times, changing layers that build up and haunt the space.
To haunt is to astonish, to startle, to make tremble, to vibrate the sensitive body, to strongly affect, to impress; is also to manifest itself and even to marvel, to cover itself with shades in order to turn the shadow visible. Such ghosts, haunts and astonishments may have a peculiar force, although they are neither concrete nor supernatural, although they may have a weak connection to the real: they are fables that say a lot about memory, different ages and the imaginary of the place and its inhabitants, building a compound, a memory-fiction. My application of the notion of memory-fiction seeks to remind another space-time by imagining what no longer is; to make present what has been destroyed; to make visible what disappeared, to make audible what fell silent; to fable faults, failures, burials, fractures, derelictions, defects, hidings, deletions, ghosts.
9An example of memory-fiction that refers to the traumatic events of colonization and opens up multiple possibilities for the development of new memory-fictions is the uncertain history of the origins of the name "Copacabana", the district in which is located the Atlantic Avenue. It is said that the origin of the name "Copacabana" is Quechua and there are multiple versions for this designation, but they usually involve a female (or androgynous) entity coming from the Andes and a relation with the waters:
"Etymologically speaking, Copacabana is an indigenous word from Bolivia, which comes from "copa" and "caguana" and means "bright or shining place". Copacabana is also a Bolivian town, at the shores of Lake Titicaca. There it was worshiped the god Copac Awana, responsible for good fishing. Copac Awana was an exotic figure – half man, half woman and with a fishtail – carved in a beautiful blue stone. The Spanish colonizers, deploying the Christian faith, erected in the town a chapel in honor of Our Lady of Candelaria, whom the Incas changed into Our Brunette Lady of Copacabana. The city hosts the largest sanctuary of Bolivia. The saint shows indigenous traits, as well as dark brown straight hair [...] The name Copacabana was only applied to the beach in Rio de Janeiro at the 19th century, when there were no longer the Tupis, and precisely when arrived from Bolivia the image of Our Lady, which was housed in a chapel near Arpoador. Another version says that the origin of the name of the beach and the district of Copacabana refers to the devotion to the Peruvian saint Kjopac Kahuana, whose image was found on the beach as if by miracle. A third hypothesis is that the Copacabana would come from the Tupi cuá cocaba ana, meaning "the touchable cove". (J. Ojeda, 2003, site)
10It is not known which of these versions is true, but all of them are good fables and fictions. Curiously, there is a certain similarity between the images of Copac Awana, the afro-Brazilian goddess of the seas Iemanjá, and some figures that ramble along Atlantic Avenue at night. But one fact stands out in the stories above, a quote that sounds like a dissonant alarm: "From the 19th century, when there were no more Tupis". The report of a genocide is "naturally" inscribed in the subtext of this seemingly mild and picturesque excerpt. The indigenous that were decimated in a devastated Atlantic Forest, buried by the cities; the enslaved Africans who were killed in these lands or on slave ships, lost in the Atlantic Ocean. How many were they? Which crowd was this? What were their names and their stories? Which monuments recall their tragedy? It is not known, there are no monuments, the memory of those colonial holocausts is not cultivated. On the surface, silence prevails, a blank space, a gap, no landmarks, no monuments, erased memories, forgetfulness, the apparent lightness of this present that pretends to ignore the past. But deeply there is a strong repression, a historical trauma, "ghosts"; an abysmal burial that requires us to dig this tragic palimpsest, to excavate through the thick layer of dust, dirt and sand, and beyond.
A new series of works has emerged as one of the results of the cartographic experience of plastic palimpsests of space and time, of history and fictions. This new series is called "Charts from Fathomless Lands". These charts and letters are built on a process of nourishment and feedback with diverse archival materials: old photos, landscape paintings, portraits, historical reports, maps. These works are made from fictions built either on the direct experience of specific places - such as the Atlantic Avenue - as in fabled elaborations based on archival material, iconography, stories, myths, historical and geographical data, etc. One of these works is "Gloves of Sand", from which follows, below, one of the archival pictures utilized (see example 4), part of the text, and a photo in a collective exhibition (see example 5) 2.
Example 4. Archive photograph of Atlantic Avenue, Copacabana-Leme,
Rio de Janeiro, 1917. Unknown Author.
11 It was a long time ago, when they left the sea and I had to run to the trees, I had to hide myself in a bottomless darkness. It was a long time after this, when a road outlined the beach and I left my place to see it: then they were also arriving by the land, and the lurks started to fall short, decreasing, shrinking. It was when the first lights sparkled on the poles curved over the road. It was when the huge breakers of 1921 took away part of the road and left hangovers of sand and sea at the doors of the big houses. I was listening to everything, from under the balconies. It was when I walked with that family, blowing the fringes of the children that laughed sea wind. It was when these children had grown up and strolled, elegant, over the undulating pebbles. It was when these children aged and died, one of them carried by the sea, even before he aged. He was looking up, struggling for air. It was when, with gloves of sand, I touched his face for the last time.
Example 5. "Sand Gloves", Leandra Lambert, 2013. Sand gloves, fishhooks, black velvet, text, sound composition, headphones, artist book, music stand, box-frame with anti-reflective glass.
Cartographic listening: body and environment interflowing
12At this point, I would like to remember that the act of listening, practicing a free form of soundwalk is the basis of all the process. Listening, instead of being passively exercised, has an active force, as stated by Frances Dyson: “...when you listen, you enter in synergy with the world and the senses, a listening/touch that is the essence of what is called visceral reaction — a response that is both physiological and psychological, mind and body." (F. Dyson, 2009: p. 4)
Pascale Criton considers the act of listening a complex practice. She observes the entwinement between the psychic and the concrete aspects: listening "...as the acting of representations and sensations, at the same time real and in relation with fiction. I consider listening as a production — an elaboration, a subjective process." (P. Criton, 2012: p.53).This concept of listening points to intricate relations with space, time and materiality. The auditory space is wider than the visual space: it is multidimensional, it approximates and produces distances, blurs the frontiers, mixes the inside and the outside, creates a "transient sensorial territoriality" (id.ib. p. 55), in the words of Criton. One can say that the auditory space creates a multiplicity of ways, trajectories and possibilities of movement. A soundwalk is transformed into a pansensorial and synaesthicwalk, through a palimpsest oftimes, spaces, movements. It is a kind of multidimensional labyrinthine stroll, in which the superimposed routes of walking, listening, feeling, seeing, experiencing, remembering, and imagining are in complex, emergent and sometimes chaotic relations. This space of complex relations is cartographic, in the terms of Deleuze; it establishes a net of inextricable connections and confluences:
"The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it. The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is in movement." (G. Deleuze, 1997: p. 83)
13This kind of map is not static or merely representational: it is a map in process, a map of movements and in movement. And these movements are not only kinaesthetic: they are experiences, intensities, fictions, memories, and oblivions in motion. These cartographies are mingled to the creation of heterotopies. Art and music are made of itineraries and the construction of heterotopies. My artistic process occurs mostly in the construction of transitory heterotopies in everyday routes and places. This process is continued through some artistic mediation, cartographic traces of these "other spaces" that were transiently created in everyday places. There is not a desire of representation, expression or synthesis in these experiences: I just seek for traces, and the construction of fabulations or, as I like to call, experienced fictions.
Gilles Tiberghien (2012),in his hodological studies in modern and contemporary arts, observes the dialectical opposition between two kinds of routes: the pre-existing routes, streets, roads and surfaces built to facilitate and accelerate the access, all of them passages created by habit; and the recreated routes, procedural, time demanding paths, even implying the possibility of "wasting time". These ways bump into the dangers of wandering. It’s in this second kind of route that my work happens, and the act of listening guides the construction of these paths-itineraries. Brandon LaBelle believes acoustic territories are not exactly places, but itineraries: “Sound creates a relational geography that is most often emotional, contentious, fluid, and which stimulates a form of knowledge that moves in and out of the body” (B. LaBelle, 2010: Kindle version, intro). The movement of the body through a path is not necessary to constitute a movement of the body through sound: sound is, in itself, a movement, a trajectory, an itinerary. A quiet body, standing in apparent stillness in a place is, in fact, moved by sound in, at least, two ways: the micro-physical movements sound acts over the body; and the imagination creating narratives and spaces through listening. After this, one can say that a walking body is not only walking along a pathway: it creates layers of paths. In fact, a soundwalk is always a complex overlap of diverse itineraries, an emergent cartography - and the exercise of a cartographic listening.
The body in itself can also be considered a cartography, a crossed territory: “the human body itself is conceived as a portion of space, with its borders, vital centers, defenses and weaknesses, his armor and defects”(M. Augé, 1997: p. 58). And how this territory is configured? Statically or dynamically, as a subject, object or as a third margin in motion, a flowing boundary? “...Bodies are maps of power and identity. [...] We are responsible for the boundaries. We are these boundaries” (D. Haraway, 2000: p 105-106). The body can be experienced as a fluid territory, a third way, a diaspora in the interstices, in the delinquence of being in motion, producing reports:
“If the delinquent only exists in motion, if he specifically lives not at the margin but in the interstices of the codes he is breaking and dislocating, if he is characterized by the privilege of the route over the state, the report is delinquent. [...] in terms of space, this delinquency begins with the inscription of the body in the text of the order. The opacity of the moving body, gesturing, walking, enjoying, is what indefinitely organizes the one here in relation to the one elsewhere, a ‘familiarity’ in comparison with a ‘strangeness’. The report of the space is at its minimum degree a spoken language... (M.de Certeau, 2008: pp. 216-217).
Open conclusion
14All these processes provoke a permanent questioning about what establishes our relation with the world. As said by Bill Viola: this relation determines the possibility of existence of our own conscience.
There is still a tendency to separate and oppose the capacities of reflection, imagination and conceptualization from the corporeal processes that sensorially link us to the environment, to other species. What seems to occur is just the opposite: it is through sensorial relations inside the environment that different forms of intelligence are produced and transformed. It is inside the world of sensations that the spirit is constructed — and the spirit produces sensations. The concept of pansensorial points to a deconditioned experimentation of the world through the senses, deconstructing limitations and hierarchies that regulates bodies, sensibilities, capacities. This kind of sensorial experience is in relation with imagination and memory: it leads to and constructs a trans-infra-supra-sensorial experience. The apparent oppositions are just layers that lie in the transformations of existence.
The environments, the milieus that surround us are also corporeal-conceptualshapes. They are ever changing, composed by human and non-human animals in movement, other organisms and remains. They are live spaces full of constructions, tools and inorganic debris, signs and marks. All this materiality participates in countless relationships, in an intricate and inextricable complexity of spaces, times, and lives. The environment is alive, a landscape-body-other. The surroundings are not around us: they make us. In all my artistic processes I try to focus in the production of intense relations with the environment, composing a cartography that is ever changing, alive.
There is a term used among the Kaluli people of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, “a:ba:lan”, which can be translated as stream, current, flow like a river; such term applies to a complex concept. The Kaluli guide themselves through the forest primarily by sound. The sense of space and location of the Kaluli, an identification of/with the place, is primarily activated by sonic elements, through an elaborate intersensoriality. This concept of “flow” determines both “the flowing water of rivers, crossing and connecting lands, as the voice crossing and connecting thinking, movement, feeling, body”. A:ba:lan also relates to the silent echoes of the voice, of poetry and music in memory. The cartographies of the Kaluli are based on this multiple, mixed and complex flow (S. Feld, 2005: p. 179-189). Although I never met a Kaluli in my life, this joyful notion is tuned to this work.
15It is known that the tiny transformations and micro-interventions that art and music can realize are not capable of affecting the global environment, not enough to provoke the urgent macro-changes that are now more necessary than ever. But maybe our micro-actions could vibrate something in the tissue of reality - and there will be some resonances. As said Guattari, in the utopic end of The Three Ecologies: « Subjectivity, through transverse keys, is established at the same time in the world of the environment, of the great social and institutional assemblages, and symmetrically, within the landscapes and ghosts that inhabit the most intimate spheres of the individual. The reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in a particular field invokes other reconquests in other fields. This way, a whole catalysis of the resumption of confidence of humanity in itself is to be forged step by step and, sometimes, from minimal ways. » (F. Guatarri, 1990: p.56)
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VIOLA Bill (1988): Survey of a decade. Houston, Contemporary Art Museum.
VIOLA Bill (1995): Reasons for knocking at an empty house. Cambridge, The MIT Press.
WESTERKEMP Hildegard (2007): "Soundwalking". Originally published in Sound Heritage, Volume III Number 4, Victoria B.C., 1974. Revised in 2001. Re-published in Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Paris, Ed. Angus Carlyle/Double Entendre, p. 49.
Notes
1 link: http://www.interferencejournal.com/articles/sound-methods/experienced-sonic-fictions
2 Exhibition: "Supernovas 013". Galeria TAL - TechArtLab, Rio de Janeiro, 2013.