GROUND, UNSETTLE, SURROUND: An Echo
By Josh Rios
Ground, Unsettle, Surround (2020). Photograph by Joel Tsui, courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.
Track 1: Introduction
At the end of June with so much behind us regarding the global health crisis and so much on the socio-political horizon yet to take place, we began work on a new sculptural sound project. Ground, Unsettle, Surround would eventually serve as a sonic documentary of sorts, centered around the unrest reverberating in Chicago and the U.S. through the Summer and Fall of 2020. The sonic collage assembles an array of audio sources: field recordings from protests, vocal reenactments, political dialogs, experimental music compositions, and a new sound piece by Dine/Chicana artist, Autumn Chacon. As an assemblage it engaged various ecologies of history, thought, and theory around #Landback, Decolonize Zhigaagoong (Chicago), All the Monuments Must Fall, #Defundthepolice, and #Policefreeschools.
Ground, Unsettle, Surround (2020). Photograph by Joel Tsui, courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.
Track 2: Ground
Four speakers elevated on stands surround an empty lectern positioned on a shallow rotunda. They sound out a twenty-five-minute audio track that moves across and between the speakers. Helicopters swirl, the crackle of hacked police radios blip in and out. Chants emerge: “I’m on stolen land; built by stolen people.” Guitars drone. Fred Moten’s (re)performed words sound out: “you know settlers go into land that they steal and set up a fort, and then move and operate and brutalize and destroy out of this experience they have of being vulnerable, of being surrounded.” Youth activists demand the removal of cops from classrooms. The empty lectern echoes the empty plinth of the decommissioned monument. The rotunda echoes those characteristics of the built environment that distinguish the space around a monument—a stepped way of transitioning architecturally from horizontal common ground to the rarified space of verticality. At the center that is not a center, the lectern is transformed from the place of expert pronouncement to a place of listening. But listening is no passive act. It requires the capacity to pause, reflect, and, above all, to be inscribed. Through the sculptural sound project, we sought to theorize and make material the notion that listening is an event experienced from a specific position, that the positional listener is shaped culturally, physically, psychologically by their emplacement in a specific location and the history of that location. We echo our place, and our emplacement echoes us. How does sonic territorialization—the encoding and ordering of places, sites, and borders through sound practices—announce and maintain settler power and state authority? How do we record over the sonic logics of ongoing state violence? How does sonic territorialization factor into creating celebratory zones of aural co-belonging, which have the potential to thicken into political mobility? The position of the listener is central to such questions.
Image from the script for Ground, Unsettle, Surround (2020), courtesy of artists.
Track 3: Unsettle
F*** CPD was collectively sung to the tune of Village People’s anthem YMCA at a mass gathering outside the mayor’s house the night the colonial statue would be removed from the urban park. It would come down in the hours after midnight, what might technically be the next day—those early predawn hours that mark tomorrow but are intrinsically connected to the night before. During the mass gathering helicopters circled the neighborhood where the mayor lives. For hours their propellers sliced the air, sending aftershocks of sound into public space, phase-shifting across the sky, echoing through the alleyways—past the tire shop, the corner store, the family eating off a folding table in the backyard. Later that night, in the middle of the night, city cranes and utility workers gathered at Grant Park to remove the Columbus statue from its lofty pedestal. Activists and onlookers who learned of the statue’s removal also gathered, including the president of the city police union who predictably opposed the removal and noisily clashed with protesters. Weeks prior the statue had been wrapped in protective plastic due to rising tensions around the country. Indeed, protesters had already gathered once to topple it and were met with reactionary police brutality. Everywhere public space was being rewritten.
Image from the script for Ground, Unsettle, Surround (2020), courtesy of artists.
Track 4: Noise
Sound and noise play an integral role in the structuring of cultural and political life, particularly when what constitutes sound and what constitutes noise are leveraged in the struggle over social power and public space. Conceptualizations and legal definitions regarding sound and noise change over time and can be mapped within a field of settler colonial and capitalist thought. In “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault writes at length about war as the continuation of politics by other means, as well as the idea of politics as the continuation of war by other means. How do sound regulations and sound norms continue both politics and war by other means? Focusing on sound gives cultural criticism and historical analysis a chance to listen, balancing overly common frameworks that prioritize visibility in the political, philosophic, and ethical articulation of social life wihin a white supremacist and settler colonialist framework. Additionally, the role sound plays—in the form of the protest song or the amplified call-and-response of the protest march, for example—is integral to the foundation of communities of opposition. Social groups are produced and produce themselves through their listening practices and shared repertoires of sounding out.
Image taken from news coverage of Columbus statue protest at Grant Park, Chicago, IL. July 17, 2020.
Track 5: Fragment
Ground, Unsettle, Surround was made in collaboration by Josh Rios, Matt Joynt, and Anthony Romero for the exhibition, Acoustic Resonance, curated by Julie Poitras Santos, director of exhibitions for the ICA at MECA. Furthermore, Assistant Director Nikki Rayburn built the platform and Steve Drown, Coordinator of the Bob Crewe Program in Art & Music, facilitated the audio installation. While I have written this text, the ideas and the work are not mine. They document the result of thinking with others in the dialogic exercise of study and praxis, whereby ideas and methodologies are temporarily stewarded rather than formulated as private intellectual property. Authorship is a complex relational process of communal culture making. We seek to further trouble the authority of authorship by practicing the kinship of shared knowledge production. Models for structures of creative practice that challenge the singularity of authorship and expertise come from many sources, including our work as musicians. It is within these multifaceted relationships to hybrid authorship and studying together that we find our soundings are neither finalized totalities nor ours alone. Literary theorist Michael Warner’s sentiment from Publics and Counterpublics acts as a guiding refrain: “Every sentence is populated with the voices of others, living and dead, and is carried to whatever destination it has not by the force of intentions or address but by the channels laid down in discourse.” We study together to change and be changed. We broadcast our signal on the preexisting pathways and platforms that have graciously been made available by the labor and lives of others. While our voices may be composites filled with the voices of many, we are not diminished in our incompleteness or assemblage. Chicana philosopher Maria Lugones refers to the positive framework of partiality as nonfragmented multiplicity in her essay “Purity, Impurity, and Separation.” Through this Lugones conceptualizes how we can be incomplete, mixed, partial, and made of widely sourced parts without suffering the impending judgement of disunity. We can be made of others without incurring the pathological Eurocentric diagnosis of being derivative, unoriginal, or fragmented. As such, my partial and manifold voice and song are filled with the partial manifold voices and songs of others, including my direct and indirect collaborators, the histories we engage, and all the pieces that have been and will be brought into the assembly of our thought and action.
Track 6: Surround
In late June, the board of education, an appointed governing body that oversees hundreds of thousands of students, convened to vote on whether to terminate a contract between the city’s public school system and the police. The contract, which places police directly in schools, is worth over thirty million dollars. The board of education meeting, normally conducted with a limited audience in the downtown financial district, was far from the typical sleepy affair of city governance. Held remotely and streamed by thousands, the gathering was long, lasting almost six hours. Many agenda items were discussed and ruled on, but the motion to cancel the contract dominated the debate. During the meeting, youth from Students Strike Back and the #CopsOutCPS movement held a teach-in outside the president of the board of education’s home. As a public event, anyone can sign up for a slot to address the board. Youth activists had done just that. When the administrator of the meeting patched the students through, they performed a call and response chant into the phone indicting the contract as racist and anti-black. They asked, “how many more students / how many more students / have to be arrested / have to be arrested / pushed out of school / pushed out of school / beaten / beaten / tased / tased / degraded / degraded / or killed by the police / or killed by the police / before the adults / before the adults / who are supposed to love and support us / who are supposed to love and support us / will listen / will listen.”
Image from public performance of Ground, Unsettle, Surround (2020) at Congress Square, Portland (ME).
Track 7: Chant
The chant is mutual. The call and response, as a dialogic event, is both individual and collective. A performance rooted in exchange, it perforates the boundary between the self, the other, and the public. It begins with the discrete but results in the social. Both are required, the one and the many, the singular and the collective. The call never begins with the individual, even if it is initiated thusly. One must get their voice in sync with others beforehand. What will the many be willing to repeat and amplify? The word, the ask, the demand, are not of the individual, but of the group. It is the group that allows itself to be called upon; it is the group that answers what it hears to be its refrain. It hears and accepts what it finds to be in accord. It answers the singular note with the chord. The response gives the action substance, a polyvocal return.
Students Strike Back protest at the home of the president of the Chicago Board of Education, June 24, 2020.
Track 8: Contingent
Sound is contingent. It moves and is moved from category to category—its status shifted from legible to illegible, from legal to illegal. Who owns the auditory sphere and its interpretation? who decides what counts as discord or harmony? who defines the public space that sound travels through, the vibrations of the ear, and the imaginations those vibrations are connected to? What ways does sound enter the construction of criminality and how do certain sound practices challenge settler colonial demand for quiet, control, or otherwise moderated sonorous behavior? It is the tensions found in these sound orientations that make acoustic worlding so important and in need of closer listening.
Track 9: Audio Fundraiser
As a conclusion to this project, we offer the audio work and its accompanying script to the public in the form of an audio fundraiser with all proceeds donated to the Chi-Nations Youth Council.
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Josh Rios is guiding a study group with Drawstring starting January 9th titled Sound, Power, and Culture with 60% of proceeds going to Chi-Nations.
See all of Drawstring’s 2021 programming here.