Conversation #3: Sound As Monument
With Arielle Julia Brown, La’Vender Freddy, Natalie Hopkinson. Moderated by Arlette- Louise Ndakoze.
Every street, every city has an aural character and ephemeral texture. It is a document of the place, and the people who inhabit it, and the lives they lead. Each of the panelists of Sound As Monument grapples with the sonic textures of the places they work. Together they delved into how sound functions as a monument to memory, whether it can heal and restore. The panel interrogated whether advancing/acknowledging the culture of their sounds can be a functional framework for developing new futures for a community.
Watch the recording here.
About the speaker:
Arielle Julia Brown is a creative producer, social practice artist and dramaturg. Emerging from her work and research around U.S. slavery, racial terror and justice, Arielle is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. She is the founder of The Love Balm Project (2010-2014), a workshop series and performance based on the testimonies of women of color who have lost children to systemic violence. The Love Balm Project was developed and produced at cultural institutions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta. More recently, Arielle developed The DoubleBack, a site-specific performance about three enslaved Black women in Providence RI while in residence at the Center for Reconciliation. She is also the founder and creative producer of Black Spatial Relics, a new performance residency about slavery, justice and freedom. Arielle was a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow and has recently joined the team as a Performance Curator. She received her B.A. from Pomona College and was the 2015-2017 graduate fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University where she received an M.A. in Public Humanities.
La’Vender Freddy is the alter ego of Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson. a conceptual sound artist, composer, and prophylactic Afro-Electro dance time traveler. His works attend to patterns and forms in sound and space, using deep listening techniques and reproduction technologies for engaging sonic influences and reforming social awareness. He calls this artistic study “Sonarcheology”. A creative art practice merging improvisational listening with environmental archeology. By way of this method the art attempts to relisten to interrelationships between sound and shape, sonic information and sonic place – or what he calls “the ancestry of sound”. His works have been live performed across the nation and featured in several documentary films. He is currently the artist in residence with the RethinkVets coalition, a two-year initiative collaborating with members of the post-9/11 veteran community.
Dr. Natalie Hopkinson is Associate Professor in the doctoral program in Howard University’s Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies. Her penetrating essays blend the humanities, public policy and advocacy. Her book-length studies of art, history and media include: Go-Go Live, A Mouth is Always Muzzled, and Deconstructing Tyrone. She is a former staff writer, editor at the Washington Post, a columnist at Huffington Post, and one of the founding editors of pioneering digital magazine The Root. Her scholarship and work as a co-founder of the Don’t Mute DC movement influenced the legislation to make Go-Go the Official Music of Washington, D.C. in 2020. She currently serves on the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
Arlette-Louise Ndakoze. As a philosopher, fiction writer, and curator, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze researches on pan-African sciences and their forms of mediation. She focuses on the connection between text and sound, in the broader sense the one between spiritual-immaterial and physical-material spheres - those spaces of possibility in the making.
For more than ten years, A.-L. Ndakoze has been drawing on artistic and intellectual movements - in Rwanda in particular, and across pan-African cultures in general - with research on philosophical disciplines, sonic history, literary scenes, and the link that holds cultures together to this day.
As a member of SAVVY Contemporary, A.-L. Ndakoze co-guides the radio SAVVYZΛΛR, a transposition of SAVVY Contemporary on air, launched in June 2020. In this sonic world of potentialities, forms of pain move to channels of their liberation.
Marking Absences – Shifting Narratives, organized by curator Niama Safia Sandy, takes place in multiple formats including a digital conversation series, an interactive installation, and more.
Leading up to the events: A People’s Manifesto
1014 and the Goethe-Institut New York asked New Yorkers how they believe monuments and public art should function. In October, their answers will be displayed on the Goethe-Institut’s storefront at 30 Irving Place. Visit bit.ly/publicartmanifesto to contribute.
Marking Absences – Shifting Narratives is presented by the Goethe-Institut New York and 1014 as part of Shaping the Past, a project of the Goethe-Institut, Monument Lab, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Shaping the Past connects memory workers across Canada, Mexico, the US, and Germany who have piloted new approaches to shape the past in their own local contexts. Visit www.goethe.de/shapingthepast for more information on the project and all related events.
Photo: Sonarcheology Studios “Ricardo Robinson”