Lucreccia Quintanilla
Whose Myth?

This research takes place via a variety of approaches to art and culture making, which include sound works, field recordings, music event organising and curating, DJing, sculpture, live sound performances, remixing and writing. It has been shaped by conversations, reading groups and engaging with the works of others as part of an intersectional network of artists working in Naarm, Melbourne, as well as with peers around the world. The later stages of this research have also been developed within a larger context of COVID-19. The later works produced have developed in adaptation to the conditions created by lockdowns and machine mediated relationality.

This research has thrived in what poet, writer and theorist Édouard Glissant describes as the unforeseeable meanderings of relation.1. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press,, 1997).21. These meanderings began when my family left El Salvador, a country in Central America which has suffered much violence through colonisation and a bloody civil war and its aftermath. It is estimated that more than 25 percent of its population dispersed and migrated during the country's civil war, which began in 1979 and ended in 1992. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/el-salvador-despite-end-civil-war-emigration-continues Accessed: 7/3/2021

My approach to this contribution is based on the anecdote, the conversation, the lived experience and the exchange as it relates to both cultural and formal concerns of how the diaspora develops a voice in its multiplicity. 

From the beginning of this research, the echo as a sound phenomenon was identified as the very core of the project. In the context of this research, the echo is understood as a metaphor, a formal device, an explorative device and a method of research in itself. The echo effect works as follows:

I have applied this definition of the workings of the echo to a methodological approach. The following is a list focused on intersubjectivity—that is, the sharing of ideas with the people, place and spaces that I occupy and create work within. This list has been crucial to drawing links between conceptual and aesthetic constraints in order to explore their material and aesthetic possibilities. The contours, much like the walls from which the echo bounces, that delineate this research have become a generative space of artistic research.

By presenting you, the reader, with these points I expect that you too will be able to keep them in mind as you read through each chapter.

Colonialism relies on control of the autonomy of the collective and the self. To this end, it categorises by race and allocates privilege according to this hierarchy. This project is not based around the politics of categorisation or identification with a nation state or allegiance to a flag. Nor does it defer to essentialist notions of reduced identities as performance. It does, however, acknowledge adaptable cultural genealogies and ancestral languages. This research aligns itself with Glissant’s definition of errantry, a way of defining the self as existing within a set of relations rather than as a static identity.Ibid.

Negotiating a space of understanding together is crucial to this research. While I was thinking of how I could explain this concept, I remembered a particularly frustrating moment in which I wanted to share something but its reception became problematised by my interlocutor’s preconceptions. This is what I like to call the tortilla incident. This was not an isolated event but a frequent occurrence, which almost always went like this:

I would introduce an Anglo-Australian friend of mine to a new food. He would respond with, for example, “This is like a pancake except made out of corn but flat and savoury.” It was a tortilla.

There seemed to be a perpetual need on my friend’s part to always centre his experience as the basis for judgement. If what I was sharing was a fruit, for example, this fruit could not be a fruit on its own nuanced terms.

It is of course natural to seek to ground one’s understanding of the world in a familiar cultural experience—as in the tortilla anecdote. What I am instead asking is that you, the reader, become what Gayatri Spivak terms “inter-literary” rather than “comparative” in approaching this text.G.C. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2012).52. This approach applies most specifically to the experiential anecdotes present throughout this paper. They exist there to anchor a set of concerns within everyday experience and contextualise the theory in practice.

Another example of these lived instances involved me listening to Latin music in my loungeroom at time when I was beginning to engage more deeply with sound in an artistic context. I described to the other person in the room how this music spoke to me in a particular way. Emotionally of course, and aesthetically most certainly. My visitor proceeded to argue that my liking of this music was exclusionary. After all, he argued, music should able to be understood by everyone. Following this logic founded in a universalising Western standard, which he argued I was irrationally challenging, my engagement with Latin music was of no real substance nor relevance.

If the words of this proponent of the Western as universal— that is, a music everyone understood—were to be taken seriously, it seemed I had been given a binary to work within. In this binary, I identified two potential options to speak to my interest in this particular sound. One was to understand that the legacy of my ancestors had no space in Australia, the place I sought refuge in, and so this legacy was now irrelevant. The other acceptable logical approach would be to look at this legacy with an anthropological remove via this Western lens I had been not so generously offered —as a type of othered curiosity, in the way perhaps of World Music.  Which is to say, in our conversation I was forced to take a position of ‘objectivity’ in order to engage. Neither of these options worked for me.

I had been very suspicious of the motives of assimilation from the initial stages of settling in Australia, with the intuition that erasing knowledges is a violent act, and I was beginning to become confident with my own standpoint despite having lived with the persistent Australian narrative of assimilation for some time I also felt there had to be another way other than what I had experienced as the conditional permission to perform the more acceptable stereotypes that multiculturalism presented as an option.

Cultural assimilation is a term that may be perceived by its proponents as a way to achieve a type of social cohesion rather than what is: a colonial impulse to eradicate, police and control that which is not of the coloniser/dominant cultural language. It is an essential aspect of settling into a colonised land, if you will. Therefore, to want to oppose assimilation is to open a space of complete discomfort and, if you are a migrant, this is also a dangerous space and a potentially ungrateful space. The question became of how to deal with the effects of assimilation on the self in a way that was productive for the collective.

The time of no sleep during early motherhood is one of short circuits. It is a time when one tries to avoid panic in the face of an inconsolable baby by doing the most instinctual of things. On one of these occasions I stunned myself as I sang:

The first songs I thought of singing to my child were not English-language songs about tiny spiders climbing up waterspouts, nor about twinkling little stars. They were songs I had heard before, over and over, songs I had sung to my little cousins to soothe them. Cultural defiance had struck in the most subtle, practical and unexpected of ways. Down the street, decades since I had sung the melody, there it was. Calming my child, the tears stopped running down his face and began to pour out of my eyes instead. These were Nahuatl words—ayote, meaning pumpkin, coyote—voiced again, but this time in Australia. This was not a performance work, it was an echo, an actual event, not its representation. Not that my child would have cared for the context in which the lullaby was delivered—he fell asleep as I sang.

I relate this personal story within this academic context as a way to instigate a reimagining through an artistic context. But also, it is not a stretch of the imagination to contextualise this anecdote as an involuntary trespass, a spillage of sorts against strong assimilationist expectations of conforming. I was exhausted. I thought I was doing well living a covert life and doing what assimilation asked of me. Singing this lullaby had somewhat ruptured civility as I had lived it so far. The surfacing of this lullaby was a very significant moment.

I grew up around the making, performing and teaching of music, a legacy that I aggregate to as an artist who very often works with sounds. My works often begin with anecdotes involving personal histories, which are placed to the same importance as academic texts because they are crucial knowledge to my practice as an artist. 

When speaking about Jamaican music sound and writer Louis Chude-Sokei  argues that through the technology of the sound system, Jamaican sound becomes a form of collective orality: 

This research learns from the specificity of writers such as Chude-Sokei and applies these approaches to my own practice and that artistic material important to this research project. This research has sought to work with complexity, depth and irresolute nature of mythologies and genealogies as ongoing and grasping, an approach that works outside of the conclusion-making standards of external observation. In doing so, this research maps out how I am contributing directly to these genealogies in a respectful, adaptive and critical way.

This thesis is composed of three main chapters, which detail the implications of different facets of the echo and its use within artistic practice and thought.

The first chapter is titled The echo and its diffractions. It examines the echo within creative works completed and exhibited throughout the duration of this project. In addition, an event is documented that took place early within the research. Each of the works examined has a different approach to looking at a multiplicity of timelines, and each engages with conversations around both the intimate and collective experience of sound. The politics of relationality, experimentation and joy around the sound event is discussed in relation to the creative work of the diaspora. The work of the diaspora is placed within the context of diffraction as the action which creates the echoic effect. The chapter is indebted to the scholarship of diaspora writers whose work examines Jamaican music—reggae, dancehall and dub such as Julian Henriques and Louis Chude Sokei. My research overlays this existing research over an understanding of the echo within the echo of Mayan architecture and European lore, based on the sound within the conch shell.

The second chapter titled Ongoing narratives reconfigures ways in which the echo can be understood in human history. Further to this, it looks to mythology and science fiction as ways to frame the echo as a narrative device. The echo is examined for its capacity to think through working methods for collaboration via intersubjective and relational approaches to artmaking. This chapter takes the echo as a narrative and adaptive pragmatic force and investigates it through science fiction and anecdotes. Through this analysis of the echo, a central creative work developed within this project, a work that examines the development and physical rendering of a musical instrument from anecdote.

The third chapter titled Reverberance, Resonance and Looping engages with ideas around orality, mythology, voice and feminism through the anecdotal, Mesoamerican mythology and feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s important work into how the Latin American diaspora can find new possibilities and ways to interact within the diasporic setting. This chapter looks at the echo within the framework of a collaborative and live performance that focused on the aggregation of mythologies via sound. This part of the research makes connections between techniques in DJing and sonification and oral and written narrative forms. Crucially, this chapter considers the utterance of an echo as being a direct reflection of the conditions and surfaces which produce it.

The concluding chapter is a summary of the findings and developments from this creative research project. Further to this, it outlines the contribution of the research within the field of sound. The conclusion determines the impact and significance of this echo-led research on understandings of the intersubjective and the relational within sound. This chapter maps out the lessons and limitations within the research, and projects strategies for moving forward with future creative works based on developing a strong non-colonial-led contribution to the wider cultural landscape. This conclusion also offers insight and direction for intersubjective, relationally-focused study approaches for artists living in the diaspora.

The pull towards the sound of the echo as a metaphor and as a practical approach to cultural production resides in its ability to speak of an irreducible space, even if only for a period of time, that does not hold a physical entity beyond the human psyche. What this creative project finds in sound and specifically the echo is the presence of both the intimate and the collective, the socio-cultural, the mythological, the formal and the generative potential of working within the diaspora as an experimental site. This condition is both a privilege and a point of tension and it is here that the politics of this project resides.

In what follows I examine the echo from different vantage points. These various ways of engaging with the echo range from the anecdotal and the archaeoacoustical through to satellite technology, dub music, soundsystem culture, and via my own creative research works.

The echo presents a grounding for entering into conversations around relationality, the adaptive qualities of knowledges that are passed down from one generation to the other, and the way the diaspora moves through its new surroundings. That said, this project is not a tragic variation of the search for identity after colonisation, with its fixation on a purity or an essential pre-colonisation identity Édouard Glissant is a poet, philosopher and critic whose influential work speaks to culture and race, and is of great influence on the Créolité movement in the Caribbean. Glissant’s work is known for its nuanced, poetic and pertinent analysis of the potential for creative acts—specifically in literature—for the diaspora and the colonised. Glissant. 17..

In particular, Glissant’s theorisation of ‘opacity’ permeates this research project. Every paragraph in this text exploring an understanding of the function of the echo in diaspora can be understood as a way to converse with ancestral knowledge while simultaneously developing ways to engage with new contexts. Opacity for Glissant, within an artwork, may work in either of two ways: as an ethical stance and as a poetics. Specifically, Glissant argues that there are wider artistic uses for an,

By irreducible opacity Glissant refers to an opening up to the idea that both in tactic and aesthetic approaches, an experience of what is understood as difference cannot and does not need be reduced to a single identifiable and easily categorised and reduced representation. This is important, as while acknowledging the conditions and context in which texts (or artworks) are produced, it is a main intention of this research to bypass interaction with the binary or dualistic thinking that has dominated perceptions of the world by way of Western colonisation, especially oppositionality’s of the human and subhuman based on race and culture. Following Glissant, opacity as an approach acknowledges the complexity and multiplicity of experience.

Sound as a medium, while being capable of containing cultural specificities through motifs—in much the same way as the visual—is also time-based and as such it is able to connote and conjure time-specific place and emotion. The echo in sound in particular has qualities which have historically lent themselves to being used as metaphors.

As a sound phenomenon, the echo maintains a connection with an original sonic signal. If you imagine saying ‘hello’ within a cave for example, your word will travel and then bounce from the surfaces of the wall and so the sound you hear is both your voice as well as the greeting returned. That echo is the product of a process of refraction; the ‘hello’ is returned to you via an effect resulting from its bouncing from the walls of the reverberant space, in this instance the cave. The echo heard may have been created by the initial sound, but it is also an entity in itself. 

The experimental jazz musician, poet and filmmaker Sun Ra sang ‘space is the place’ as the main verse of the song of the same title. Sun Ra, who was working at the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s in the USA, conceived an ambitious project that looked to outer space as a site for mapping a better way of existing for African American people. The aim was to engage with its history and, in doing so, imagine radical possibilities outside of the constraints and limitations resulting from ongoing categorisations of what is considered human and non-human.

Sun Ra’s way of thinking through sound resonated with me and is important to this project, although of course I live within a vastly different personal and racial narrative to Ra. Much like the role that space played in Ra’s artistic and emancipatory imaginary, the echo in this project creates space for understanding and possibility within the unknown. These possibilities include the mapping out of future collaborative and generative approaches for me to imagine existing in unceded First Nation’s lands as a migrant settler.

The echo as a locative device is not an impossible task, either metaphorically or scientifically. Whales communicate via echolocation within the depths of the waters on Earth and very recently, in 2014, the Rosetta space probe (figure 1) mapped the surface of Comet 67P/Churyomov-Gerasimenko via sound signals. This process worked by measuring the distance a sound signal took to return to the probe, in the way of an echo. This example does not merely present the echo as a way to measure and imagine the shape of a far-away object. If I am to take it back to a metaphor, the echo when looked at in this way allows for the possibility of imagining ourselves as deeply embedded in an understanding of faraway time that is measured from the present but limitless in its future and its past.

Your first impulse may be to locate this enquiry into the echo within the Mediterranean myth of Echo. The nymph Echo is punished after her talking distracts the goddess Hera from being able to concentrate on spying on Zeus, her husband, as he seduces a woman. Echo is thereby banished by Hera to live in a cave in the mountains and condemned not to speak a word unless her utterance is the repetition of the very last word in a sentence spoken by her interlocutor, in perpetuity. When Echo falls in love with Narcissus, who was too self-obsessed and in love with his own image as reflected on the surface of the water, to pay attention to Echo’s afflicted declarations of love, we see the fullest expression of this cruel punishment.

I am writing this from within the Western institution, so I would be remiss to discuss the echo and not mention this myth. It has after all continued to be an important part of the imaginary of a whole civilisation. As I workshopped possible ways through which to shape my engagement with such an important myth, two options came to the fore:

1.     I—a marginalised voice as a migrant settler of the Salvadoran diaspora—could take the character of Echo and rewrite the story to redeem her. However my voice as an artist is a complex one which seeks to remove itself from narratives around victimhood. 

2.     I could take on the heroic role of rescuing Echo by helping her find the ability to speak her own thoughts, articulating sentences from beginning to end, that she could speak to the distracted Narcissus.

As I contemplated my task, I realised that just as the words that Echo must use are the words of others, the words I would be ‘echoing’ would not be my own but, rather, those of the dominant, visually-focussed Narcissus himself.M. Bull, The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (Routledge, 2018).277. My own echo would re-piece the words, reconfiguring them from the fragments she repeats.Ibid. That is, I would be overlaying a narrative counterintuitive to the motivations behind this project. But this is counterintuitive not just because it is a Western narrative. The most significant problem here is that the echo, the sound effect itself, is seen as a negative attribute, a type of penance, a limiting shackle which, within this artistic project, it is not. By contrast, the echo in this project is a space of possibility. And while I have rejected the Western myth of Echo as a way to contextualise this practice within the academic context for the above-mentioned reasons, the cave itself is still a compelling part of the myth to me.

When I was a child in El Salvador, perhaps seven years old, I walked away from my family while we were enjoying an outing at the beach. I walked far away and found myself at the front of a cave. It was dark and intriguing. I entered it and walked in on what must have been hundreds of sleeping bats hanging from the rocky ceiling. I screamed out loud, a high-pitched child’s scream that returned to me as an echoic force which triggered the bats into frantic screeching. Inside the cavernous space, hundreds of wings were flapping together in alarm. I ran straight back to my family in a panic, leaving behind the chaotic and frightening cave, with its infinite darkness echoing in echo. I tell this terrifying and exploratory childhood story because the uncertainty, the unknowingness, that I felt in the cave is what floods the sensorial body when the echo is used in music such as dub.Dub music is a genre of music originated in Jamaica characterised by its use of electronic equipment and echo as an effect as part of its intrumentation.

Osbourne Ruddock, otherwise known as King Tubby, pioneered the dub style through the literal ‘overdubbing’Overdubbing (also known as layering) is a technique used in audio recording where a passage (typically musical) has been pre-recorded, and then during replay another part is recorded to go along with the original. The overdub process can be repeated multiple times. of recording tape, which gave the genre its name. The production process entailed one song overlayed onto another, creating a ‘ghost’ of another voice or melody. Hence dub production has a formal quality, evoking layers of cultural memory and timelines through this sonic palimpsest. Artist, writer and sound scholar Louis Chude-Sokei speaks of cultural memory as neither innate or nostalgic but, rather, as an invocation. Within the language of dub, the producer takes on the role of the conjurer, the one asked to assume their role in the continuum of something booming, alive. It is not melancholia—on the contrary, it is a generative space and a place of acknowledgement, a conflation of timelines.

There are many types of effects units, both analogue and digital, designed to distort music to create the effect of the echo, and there are mathematical equations that allow for different types of echoes to be achieved via machine. Boxes with springs inside create a delay effect when applied to a segment of a song, evoking distance and playing with time in such a way as to invocate other temporalities and deeper spaces. In dub, the echo is a holistic device, as described by ethnomusicologist Michael Veal:

Veal’s conceptualisation of the echo as speaking to chronologies is important to this research, which positions the echo as existing within a circular timeline. Which is to say, the sonically experienced ‘decay’ in the echo is not the ‘end’ of a signal connection, but instead a connection to a source that propagates and returns again and again in rhythm, even if as it fades.

In dub music, the function of the echo is also as a sonic relational device. In his highly reproduced text Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber, Chude-Sokei describes the echo as it functions specifically within the music of the African Diaspora:

The echo in dub begins with a signal, an element from a familiar song, an instrumental element or a lyric. An effect will then intercept this sound, distorting, enhancing and abstracting it via machines such as an analogue echo, spring reverb units or a digital device. This effected sound is further amplified, played out of a large sound-system tuned to the nuance of the echo.

In the dialogues around dub music—especially for Chude-Sokei, Veal and theorist and filmmaker Julian Henriques—the echo is referred to as a metaphor that abstracts and diffracts a sound of origin, in turn speaking to the dispersal of peoples from Africa across the Transatlantic Ocean because of the way in which the effect itself operates. This view guides this research, privileging sound as an important part of aural traditions and their narratives. For Chude-Sokei, “the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.”Ibid.

Following Chude-Sokei’s remarks on the echo as “the source of narrative,” it is important to ask how narratives occur within sounds, rather than in lyrics and words. Julian Henriques describes the echo as behaving as a verb, a doing in the world, a becoming.J. Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011).165. Henriques draws a poetic parallel between the sonic occurrence of the echo and its use as a metaphor when he speaks to the way in which it behaves within a space. Musically, in dubbing, this is often a reverberating echo gradually diminishing into silence, either coming or going, in the repetition it becomes different.Ibid. It is here that the idea of the echo as a functioning metaphor really comes into play. For the diasporic individual, it is no longer the ‘sound’ of origin but instead a reverberation of it, becoming different and yet still maintaining conversation and connection via repetition with the signal from which it diffracts.

Writer, theorist and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun, likens the echo’s affect to the act of creating a space—chambers able to be navigated or routes through a network of volumes, doorways and tunnels, connecting spatial architectures as refractions bouncing back from any surface create new immersive spaces out of physical walls.K. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet Books, 1998). 65 This space that Eshun speaks of, this collective and subjective space, is alive with a politic that is complex and ancestral, that relates to past and future human experience. The echo in this instance behaves as a connector for experiences and narratives.

Archaeoacoustics is a branch of research into the acoustics of archaeological sites and artifacts. Archaeoacousticians such as David LubmanNico F. Declercq et al., “A Theoretical Study of Special Acoustic Effects Caused by the Staircase of the El Castillo Pyramid at the Maya Ruins of Chichen-Itza in Mexico,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116, no. 6 (2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1764833. 3328. have spent a considerable amount of time researching the physics behind the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kukulkan (figures 3 and 4). It is one of many structures on the Chichen Itza Mayan Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, a significant pre-Columbian site dated from 600AD to 1200AD. The Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kukulkan is known for recreating the chirping sound of the quetzal bird (figure 2), which occurs when a person positions themselves at the bottom of the pyramid and claps their hands, thus activating the Bragg reflection effect.In very simple terms, the Bragg reflection effect is one whereby sound waves hit and ricochet off surfaces to then diffract from these surfaces, thereby creating a doubling of the initial sound as it bounces out. The length and pitch of the echo also depends on the length the wave travels. This is the sonic effect created when the sound of a clap bounces upwards from one step to another, to arrive at the top chamber. Upon its arrival to the top chamber of the pyramid, the clapping sound is transformed to mimic the chirping of the quetzal, a sacred bird of significance in Mesoamerican culture.

According to archaeoacoustic research, the pyramid’s structure was intentionally built with these sonic qualities in mind. There is also research that suggests that an extra effect was employed to create the chirping sound further asserting that the sonic effect of the pyramid was intentional. Frans A. Bilsen, "Acoustics at Chichen Itza," in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2016).1.

Imagine, reader, as I have many times, approaching the bottom step of the tall pyramid, putting your hands together and hearing the familiar sound of your own clapping hands. Via your interaction with and positioning within the space, your relationship with the building, this sounds then returns as the chirping of the very species of bird that the pyramid is named after. 

The initial signal in this case, if we are to follow the understandings of the echo already discussed, is not the clapper, but it is instead the chirp of the quetzal. The body becomes a conduit here, as in dub, one that receives and sends out signals in order to connect or, in visual terms, perform a type of retracing. 

The echo of the Pyramid of Queztacoatl Kukulkan is important for the development of generative ideas within this project as it provides a critical understanding of the ways in which sound physically instigates a connection to an original signal—one that does not necessarily directly involve contemporary machine space, as in dub, but is a sonic functionality guiding the architectural beyond the visually aesthetic domain.Chude-Sokei. Dr Satan's Echo Chamber, 50.

Beyond the fantastic unexpected effect that it creates, the echo at this important Mayan construction at the site of Chichen Itza forms a significant link between timelines. It creates an effect in which the person at the bottom of the steps is connecting, activating and becoming the instigator in a set of cultural, environmental, sonic and architectural relations and communications, even if only for the duration of the echo.

The echo speaks of a set of beliefs about those who built the pyramid and their relationship to the environment— The honouring of the Quetzal is also story-telling about the relational.

 Glissant’s description of the ‘relational’ is a way of understanding events and spaces, incidental or intentional, as connections rather than binaries of opposition. Relationality in Glissant’s writing becomes about complex and irreducible wholeness. In the pyramid example that I have presented, the human, the animal, the architectural and the environmental become part of a relational confluence, a story in circularity.

My work We shall dance by the light of the moon is a 20-minute autobiographical sound work that I produced in early 2019. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend in which I was encouraged to find out more about the Indigenous people of the region of Morazán, El Salvador, where my mother was born and where I spent a considerable amount of time as a child.

My friend, at his house and me at mine both looked as he sent me links. The obvious way to begin this search was to open the Google search engine on my laptop. The aerial views in the digital realm, as I walked my cursor through the streets, bore no depth. The searches led me to videos on YouTube, and I navigated away from new-age Mayan-themed videos, I found a video of phrases in Lenca/Putum (the Indigenous language of the Lenca people of Honduras and part of El Salvador) translated into English with the Anglo/European linguist’s voice providing a second layer of mediation. The phrases and their translations became the basis for a sound collaboration with my then twelve-year-old son. We studied their pronunciation and chose phrases which were interesting to us, being careful not to create too much of a narrative. The more I searched and read the more this quest became about failure and I found this the most interesting part of the interaction.

The opportunity came along about making a work that referenced this experience. As a mother I am invested in some ways in migrant motherhood and what the passing-down of knowledge could mean in the context of the Salvadoran diaspora. For this work my son and I took turns speaking the words in  Lenca and repeating them in their English translation. I titled it "We shall dance by the light of the moon" (sound below).

Listed below are some selected phrases and their translations. The subjects of the phrases are wide ranging. They speak of everyday activities and beliefs or are quite factual. Some , also describe the condition of Lenca/Putum language itself. These phrases were collected by linguist Alan King and presented in a video titled “Useful Phrases in Lenca”:Lepa Productions, “Useful Phrases in Lenca,” YouTube, accessed November 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fAM79o0h34.

This sound work has had a couple of manifestations, however I will speak to the work shown as part of the exhibition m_othering the perceptual ars poetica (2019), curated by Abbra Kotlarczyk and shown in Melbourne at Counihan Gallery. The sound recording of the phrases was housed in a structure sewn by hand and made out of cloth that mimicked the structure of both a cave and a tent (figure 5). Like an echo in a makeshift and precarious cave, the phrases bounced from child to mother and back again.

Just like the structure of this cave was temporal and playful, the exchange was also temporal, a mere attempt. My son and I do not practice Lenca culture, and my grandparents or their grandparents did not speak the language, which is not to say that our ways of life have not been infused with this culture, its humour and its subtle ways of understanding the world. But ultimately, all we had to exchange were these words, as we bounced them off each other and giggled or commented as we recorded ourselves.

Unlike Echo in the Mediterrean myth, the utterings of my son and I of Lenca/Putum words allow us to attempt to understand. But like Echo, this understanding is not close enough to allow us to converse ‘back’ or with ease. Our engagement is removed, but rather than silencing our subjectivity as we repeat the words, we bring to life the incommensurability of our layered cultural positioning, away from the need for clarity or to fit into a binary. This, I believe, is a political position. After all, the art world relies heavily on easy-to-digest, essentialised ‘brands’ reliant on stereotypes of exotic identities. Through this work, I wanted to engage with a particular cultural condition as it exists—unresolved and non-performative—subverting familiar anthropological/museological tropes, mis-readings and misrepresentations, which are all commonplace within institutional frameworks.

In Dub sound, one can hear a distorted beat firing into space. Repetition allows it to come back solid only to be ‘sent away’ again through the echo that is added at the end of each phrase. The Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl- Kukulkan research has led to an understanding of the physics of diffraction, which creates an echo. Feminist theorist Karen Barad’s writing on diffraction speaks of the action of the echo as one of creation:

New utterings are made with each diffraction, new temporalities in which each moment is an infinite multiplicity.Ibid., 169. It creates a complex interweaving of utterings and iterations, much in the same way as echo works within dub music.

As Veal describes it, the fetishisation of and reliance on reverberation and delay to create an echo is certainly one of the most pronounced stylistic traits of dub music.Veal, Dub, 2007. An analogue reverb machine, historically used by dub producers, usually comprises a steel box with a coil or two inside it. As the signal is put through and sound enters the box, the springs distort and reverberate. This reverberation is then amplified. As this machine affects a sound signal, what transpires in this space has implications for those in the diaspora as it presents an identification with multiple possibilities and temporalities. It is not a singular homogenised articulation but many, across space and time:

It is with the above understanding of the echo as a mode of conversation that this research project delved into the making of sound, utilising the echo as a device in compositions and their presentation, such as in the series titled A Steady Backbeat (figures 6 and 11). A Steady Backbeat is a series of ceramic works fashioned after the shape of the conch shell, taking advantage of its internal spiral architecture, which I replicated out of clay, for its capabilities as a sonic implement. These ceramic conches amplified looped sound works comprised of compositions of sampled sounds and field recordings. This shape was also inspired by the Mesoamerican ceramic conches I would look at as a child at museums in El Salvador, and later in New York. Conches are used by many First Nations cultures, both in Mesoamerica, and elsewhere, as wind instruments, both in their original form found by the sea as well as in reproductions, which are often tuned by the use of holes drilled in parts of the shell (figure 8 and 9).

The conch works I created were the result of a residency in Banff, Canada. As I settled into my studio for a month there, I wrote the following down on a piece of paper after a conversation with my son, who came with me. I wrote it after thinking about how relatively close to my family in El Salvador I was and contemplating that, even though I could not go there at that time, I was looking at the same night sky:

A couple of days later I borrowed The Parable of the Sower (1993) by Afro-futurist writer Octavia E. Butler from the library and on page five I found myself reading the following:

These words were said by Corazón, the stepmother of the central character in Butler’s story, who, like me, has Latin American ancestry. In Mayan cosmology, the stars are referred to as the ‘eyes of the night’, although without the judgement added much later by the colonial Catholic layer, where one is watched by God.

With this coincidence in mind, I worked on experiments with field recordings of walks I took around the Rocky Mountains, to engage with the surroundings. I may not have been able to convey the sky, which after all is not audible (at least with the equipment I had access to), but what is audible in these pieces is the sound of the movement of creaking trees and their leaves. To make reference to the comforting company this analogy of the sky provided my work, I created a short looping sound composition comprised of drum beats, much like a heartbeat (in place of the sound of the ocean, which is the sound most commonly associated with the placing of the ear near the conch opening). These sounds pieces are played continuously throughout the time the works comprising A Steady Backbeat are shown. The sound works are played out of broken mobile phones which are still able to function as music players and can be placed with the phone’s speakers inside the conch in order for the sound to be amplified. Using the broken phones was a crucial choice as it eliminated the use of high-end or complex external sound equipment, thereby placing emphasis on the casual and the failed everyday contemporary object being repurposed (figure 11). 

Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich wrote a detailed essay titled “Seashell Sound” Echoing Ocean, Vibrating Air, Brute Blood” in which he describes popular perceptions of the conch and its sound in European lore and literature. Helmreich describes the theory that what we hear when we place our ear to a conch is the sound of our own blood flowing through our ear canal. There is also another theory on the conch that believes that trapped human spirits is what we hear sounding through the intricate internal structure within the seashell.Stefan Helmreich, "Seashell Sound: Echoing Ocean, Vibrating Air, Brute Blood," Cabinet Magazine Winter 2012-2013, 48 (2013), accessed 5/7/2016, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/48/helmreich.php.

Most relevant to this project, however, is Helmreich’s writing on the way “in which shells concentrate memory by gathering the history of the vibrating world around them.”Ibid. The echo that is heard via the conch shell is theorised by Helmreich as a transmission of both the individual and collective experience. As he elaborates:

Within the context of this research project, the conch works are made to offer intimate listening experiences. That is, to listen to the sound within the conch one has to bend down close as they are floor-based works supported by small patches of sand that serve as support and speak to their origins as ocean and animal. On one occasion, the works were shown surrounded by invasive foreign species (which stop the growth of native plant species), which I uprooted from the banks of the Merri Creek (figure 10). My daily commute from home to studio incorporated a walk alongside the creek, which is where I first noticed these flowering plants during spring. I had noticed that these plants were being sprayed by local council workers and did further research. The weeds continued to flower and dry throughout the duration of the exhibition. It was important that these conch works were responsive to the surrounding place and conditions of where they were shown.

After completing the above works I began to research the conch shells which had inspired them and which I had seen at museums as a child. I wanted to find out the context in which they were used as instruments. Whilst conversing about this with a Chilean friend I found out about their uses in Perú by pre-Incan peoples who also used the conch shells locally known as a “pututus” as instruments (figure 12). The Chavín de Huántar structure in the Andes is a site built in 1200 BCE and is made up of many chambers which have the ritual function of amplifying the acoustic dynamics of the pututu as an instruments specifically the low frequency sounds – the bass sounds that are felt through the body –Archeoachoustics researcher Miriam A. Kolar has written widely about what she has identified in the Chavín de Huántar a construction specifically built to function as a resonant place to play the pututu in an amplifying, flow directing ritual-space.Miriam A. Kolar, "Chavín De Huántar Archaeological Acoustics Project," accessed 20/02/2021. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/chavin/project.html.

It is here where the conch in the most intimate based aspect of this research overlaps with an understanding of sound frequencies and intersubjective collective understanding in event based work.

The most important aspect of the soundsystem, much like the chambers of  Chavín de Huántar lies in its focus on the experience of bass frequencies. While engaging in intimate contexts, this research also identifies the importance of sound in a collective scale of engagement and addresses this need by creating the conditions for the relational via sound amplification and affect. My soundsystem General Feelings Soundsystem (figure 10) is a 2 x 1.5m speaker stack built in the style of Jamaican soundsystems.A speaker stack working on the mono rather than stereo format whereby the frequencies—high, medium and low—are separated, with a special focus on the bass (low) frequencies which are felt through the body rather than heard. This soundsystem is a large part of an ongoing engagement with sound, which has been in operation since 2014 and is the first female built soundsystem in Australia. The soundsystem works on the premise of the traditional speaker stack used to play dub, reggaeReggae music is a popular music that developed in Jamaica in the 1960’s. From a confluence of sounds itself. It is a slow tempo music. Reggae has come to be influential to many others styles and over time has travelled and adapted beyond the Caribbean. and dancehall Dancehall music developed from reggae and other musics in Jamaica in the 1970’s. Dancehall music is a more exuberant in comparison to reggae and was developed through a DJ scene and with a more digital instrumentation.

  music in the soundsystem culture that developed in Jamaica. This culture has travelled around the world, thriving in the UK and in Latin America, most notably as picòs in Colombia.The history of the picò and its transcultural genealogy has been written about in detail by anthropologist Deborah Pacini Hernandez. See: Deborah Pacini Hernandez, "Auto Italia, Published, Pico: Sound Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia," Auto Italia, accessed 2020. https://autoitaliasoutheast.org/published/pico-sound-systems-world-beat-and-diasporan-identity-in-cartagena-colombia/.. On a practical level, my role as a soundsystem operator has meant that I have learnt the complex physics and electronics of operating various amplifiers and speakers. How the speakers behave, and how they sound in different contexts according to the forms and acoustics of surrounding architecture, is tested and my knowledge expanded every time the speakers are used.

General Feelings Soundsystem (figure 13), rather than functioning within the parameters of one particular sound, has adaptability at its core and this is displayed in the way it travels to different communities and contexts and plays different sounds, sometimes experimental sometimes more conventional and musical. The soundsystem is perceptive and careful, and while not auditorily or physically discrete, its approach is responsive to the needs of a community in the time it works for them. This method of working is similar to what feminist architect Céline Condorelli terms as “structures of support.” For Condorelli the building of these structures of support begins from an intuition that amplifies potential in form, which in this project is the ‘vibe’ or space created through which the collective may be able to sound/hear/feel

Writing in 1980, writer, curator and feminist/socialist-activist Lucy Lippard described a set of responsive models of interaction, a type of value system that insists upon cultural workers supporting and responding to their constituencies. These three models of interaction are:

While these are now very much of their time, in that activism has adapted to political and other conditions such as the internet, Lippard’s three models are all characterised by an element of outreach—a need for connection beyond process or product—and an element of inclusiveness which also takes the form of responsiveness and responsibility for one’s own ideas and images. In other words, the outward and inward facts of the same impulse.

There are some soundsystem events, such as Barrio//Baryo, where I get to have more of an active role in creating space. This event was a collaboration with artist Caroline Garcia and together we curated works by different artists in Naarm Melbourne, towards a final performance event that spanned an entire afternoon and evening. This time slot allowed for a wide breadth of ages to be able to attend—children, parents and grandparents—creating a multigenerational space. To this end, there were performances from Lit Queens, a rap group of young girls, as well as a dance performance by KStar Studios with children aged from eleven to fourteen years old. Artist James Nguyen (figure 14) and his aunt presented a playful performance piece together, which involved the wearing of matching elaborate headdresses as well as incorporating physical and spoken multi-language play, making reference to internet communication and cross generational family relationships. With the thought that there would be children in attendance I decided to create a visual/sculptural ode to the soundsystem by making a large piñata to resemble the colours of the General Feelings Soundsystem for the kids to smash (figure 15).

Live sound works were commissioned from Chilean artist and ongoing collaborator Bryan Phillips (Galambo) as well as from Raquel Solier (Various Asses) and Neil Cabatingan (Yumgod) (sound above), who created collaborative works. Phillips worked with the sounds of Chilean First Nations folk music and its progression into a type of dub cumbiasCumbia is a genre of music that is played all throughout the Americas. It is a combination of African and indigenous rhythms., as deeply experimental tracks in their articulation. In the case of Solier and Cabatingan, they created tracks crafted from vinyl brought over from the Philippines by Solier’s grandparents decades earlier, vinyls long forgotten and left in an old box. As they were shaped via sampling and other production techniques, these old songs became new. These new tracks in turn become a contemporary way of ‘grounding’, via the layering that takes place—using melodies, drums and other aspects needed for musical arrangements—in the construction of contemporary dance music.

The soundsystem work as well as other aspects of the project were focussed on the amplification of these moments of speaking to, and engaging with, narratives, and their occurrence via sound. This is an ongoing transcultural and relationally-based project, one that is curated and detailed within the oeuvre of the aesthetics of celebration, experimentation and, most radically, joy. The soundsystem, as the amplifier taking up space, engages in an action of sounding, presence, presentation and expression.Henriques.248. This is in contrast to the model of representation of difference within an otherwise mostly Western artistic context or a space of contemplation, examination or objectification of the cultural practice of black, brown and queer bodies who were present at the Barrio//Baryo event. This event as well as others involving the soundsystem work within the sociocultural parametres of the music-led event.

Henriques has developed an understanding of sound and the ‘experiential’ by

Henriques work around the sonic logos has been a highly significant influence in this research. Henriques puts forth the case that the sonic logos, by which he means logic—sociocultural based rhetorical understanding of sound—and pathos—a sensorial, emotional form of affect in sound experience—work together relationally with ethos—the contextual world around the collective.Ibid., 265. Thus, the soundsystem in the context of the event is able, according to Henriques, to make complex connections that weave the intimate and the collective experiences together.

Activist, artist and writer Fjorn Butler describes the source of the sound, the speakers themselves, as engaging in a collaborative echoic effect:

Taking Butler’s relational understanding further, Henriques describes the relationship between the body and the echo as:

The soundsystem event is also one of celebration of a collective experience of the sensorial and it often presides over a type of ritual much like the one Lippard described earlier. A structure through which communities come together and experience both a collective and individual sense of relation to themselves and the larger narrative taking place, to which they are also adding. According to Lippard’s shaping, ritual is not one of

What Lippard is referring to is a deep engagement with a type of genealogical awareness, such as that which took place in Barrio//Baryo—an unpredictable, irreducible and joyous space, as well as space of experimentation, of futurity and engagement with ancestral spaces in ways that were sometimes explicit and sometimes opaque. This is the time that Lippard is referring to. Time to Lippard provides a deep rather than a superficial engagement via an aesthetic of exotic motifs. An aspect to these events, is the act of hosting, done through catering events with food, employing an MC to introduce the performers; in other words, creating a sense of belonging. Hosting becomes not just a way to accommodate and welcome, but also a way to facilitate an atmosphere through which a narrative can thrive and be experienced as it is being constructed and in turn received in real time. Geologist, artist and researcher on sound and affective politics AM Kanngieser describes the space of sound as generative:

Writer on sound and Indigeneity in North America Dylan Robinson terms ‘difficult music’ that which is dissonant and analogous and in interaction with difficult social and political issues. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).181. By this Robinson doesn’t necessarily mean abrasive sounds, but what he refers to is a sonification that articulates complexity and unpredictability, which eludes being simplified or easy to read. It is through this ‘difficult music’ that contemporary engagements with ancestral ways are formed, ways that can articulate conversations with forces not yet here. Similarly, sociologist Monique Charles identifies Grime music as being part of the ongoing collective narrative of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom. Charles identifies this music’s  politics as residing in its validation of the communities that engage in its making and the materiality of their lived experience of race and class hidden from the dominant narratives of Britishness. Charles argues that whilst Grime does not deal with overt political context, that sounds which tell the narratives of the Black Atlantic diaspora in Britain are political in that they simply voice an experience, in its own terms.M. Charles, 'Hallowed Be Thy Grime?: A Musicological and Sociological Genealogy of Grime Music and Its Relation to Black Atlantic Religious Discourse' (#Hbtg?) (University of Warwick, 2016). 355 The necessity for both these approaches to sound is one that has much relevance to non-white communities living in the Australian context and it is one that focuses on the creation and experience of a complexity rather than on the static politics of identification.

Having the echo as a foundation through which to explore sound making has been very enriching and generative for its functionality within both the intimate and collective realms, with a potential for the complex and the adaptive and the political in the way of Robinson’s ‘difficult music’.

In the case of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kulkulkan, the echo has become a very affirming force for this sound-based research project in conceptualising the way sound is connected with nature, rather than being extractive. As the human body’s gesture transforms its signal into the sound of a bird, we see the individual in relation to the collective—a collective of its surroundings, of trees, birds, sky and ground, of ancestors and timelines. The echo within the conch shells in their contemplative intimacy also provides a very rich connection with mythology and surrounding sound imaginary. The conch experienced in a less intimate way as an instrument in Chavín de Huántar, gave this research a way of understanding the potential of this carapace within a structure built specifically for the sensorial experience of its low frequencies in ceremony.

In this chapter I have presented three key works that engage in diffractive ways with the making of sound, ways which have been able to create their own echoic actions through sculptural, compositional, social and collaborative approaches. Lippard’s and Condorelli’s ethics around structures of support and the ritual as a space of possibility have been used in this research to position the soundsystem events as setting up the conditions for a complex form of agency to take place.

Importantly, focussing on diffraction as the action that creates an echo has made it possible to draw a connection between dub music and the soundsystem speaker stack as an instrument for the transmission and reception of the echo itself within the sonic, the physical, the emotional, the psychological, the ancestral and the multi-temporal space. Thus, Echo’s story within the myth becomes more compelling in its complexity; all Narcissus has is an image.Henriques., Sonic Bodies, 248.

To perceive the echo as propagating rather than decaying into infinity ties in with understanding the cultural collective and the individual within cosmologies that perceive time as circular rather than linear. In the diaspora, narratives are lived and spoken and, despite distances far from where they were first told, they keep going. They are adaptive rather than static, as they pick up layers here and there. The next chapter examines the complex and layered ways in which narratives adapt and what role the echo can take in their sonic conjuring.

If the echo as a sonic phenomenon is the responsive manifestation of a signal as it reacts to the surfaces that receive it, then this chapter looks to this action as a metaphor for a type of cyclical timeline through which to engage with making culture. A key to understanding this chapter is in finding a positionality from which to proceed, a site of process from which to begin, for you as the reader and for me as the writer and artist.

The following paragraphs look to sound as communication and a cultural mediator of narratives which behave like echoes; that is, in the context of a sonic—aural—narrative, a signal emitted, multiplied and returned. This chapter examines ways in which ongoing narratives formed of fragments become adaptive in order for them to continue resonating. In this chapter I put the case forward that sound itself has been overlayed with histories of coloniality.

When making reference to sound as an artistic material, this project does not distinguish between popular music, manufactured echoes, composed sound scapes or field recordings. Examined in this way, sound is opened up to a larger aural field and accordingly the research is able to make connections beyond its manifestation in the contemporary sound art realm.

This chapter begins with my own experience and artistic practice, moves through to written narratives in select science fiction works and then onto contemporary and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican narratives. It engages with ideas around sound found in research into early modes of human engagement with caves, and in the Mediterranean myth of Plato’s cave. I look to the work of Brian Fuata and his ghost performance arts practice as an example of how the diasporaIn the specific case of Brian Fuata, the Sāmoan diaspora in Australia. may productively engage with the layered condition that constitutes the political, the colonial, the architectural and the ancestral through opacity.

If what has been written about the past can be considered fictional speculative narratives, then what better technique than that of the literary genre science fiction from which to approach it. In speculating about the future, science fiction provides tools through which to recover or at least re-narrativise the past.

The following is a moment in the novel Mind Of My Mind (1977) by author Octavia Butler, often described as one of the first writers in the genre of what would later be named Afrofuturism. In this conversation, Butler guides the reader to a character’s somatic ability to focus on a specificity:

In this dialogue, Butler isolates an ‘original’ narrative not in order to essentialise the object, but in order to connect to a story that has become literally fragmented through its handling and time’s passing. In this this passage, Jan has acquired the skill to bypass the speculative aspect overlaid onto the object by the scientists who found it broken in pieces, and instead to be able to see into the subjectivity of its maker, thereby providing the holder of the object with an unmediated sensory connection with how the object was made as well as its purpose.

Every echo has an initial signal, one that is propagated as it bounces from a surface. Octavia Butler’s one-page interaction has provided much fertile ground for this project in the way of the speculative narrative and in thinking through the multiplicity within an object. In Dub music, the echo is a non-scientific, non-mediated, non-colonised line of communication created, somatically and intuitively, through sound via machine. In Butlers writing each of the layers are able be isolated.  

Science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin also finds in the object a path through which to engage with new possible ways to imagine the past. Le Guin is guided by feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s proposal that anthropology’s historical standpoint may have led it to make potentially misguided conclusions about humanity’s past, thus missing key aspects to our cultural evolution. Fisher suggests that the invention of the carrier bag, most likely woven by a woman to carry gathered fruits, seeds and nuts, was the catalyst to the “multiplier effect that led to humanity.”Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Grove Press, 1989).153. Le Guin takes this ‘carrier bag theory of evolution’ and adapts it to fiction, constructing a model for imagining the novel as functioning as this carrier, as a sack containing its characters and holding meanings powerful in their relation to one another, and to us.Barad.168. By highlighting relationality, the attention shifts away from the dominant narrative of the hero and his weapons of control.Fisher; Le Guin,  in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places.154. I agree with Le Guin’s contention that it is specific stories in their intricacy and complexity, the aural and oral stories that were passed from one to the other, which take centre stage to show how humans have thrived, adapted and evolved.

In 1984 my grandfather came to visit our family in the city of San Salvador from the town of Jocoro, Morazán, where he lived all of his life and worked as a music teacher. He must have been around eighty years old at the time, and I six. He was a big man with cataracts and his eyes were very shiny. He really enjoyed playing with me and on this visit we went to the backyard together. He wanted to teach me rhythm. “Ta-ta-ti-ti-ta,” he repeated and I clapped in beat. We practiced this until I got bored. My grandfather used a cane to walk. It was an aluminium cane with perforations on one side to make its height adjustable. He sat down and lifted the cane and placed it in front of his face and, much to my delight, he began to play a melody. The cane was now a flute and the perforations became the mouth holes out of which he played to me the Indigenous melody of a well-known cumbia song.

This little memory has remained with me since. That hour has been stretched, shaped and reshaped as time has gone on. I have always gone back to it. Distilling it. Making new from it. I would pat my child’s back to this rhythm to put him to sleep as a baby. Ta-ta-ti-ti-ta. I was trying to teach him something, but I think it also soothed me.

I have over the years attempted to make this memory material, drawing it, sculpting it, finding the song in all its many versions. These attempts have been mostly failures. I tried to remake the flute out of clay a number of times. It always broke. It was the wrong material. I resigned myself to the idea that I may not be able to make the object, so I proceeded to work through the idea that it could be the substance of the experience that I may need to concentrate on, in much the same way as Le Guin explains the novel or Butler the vessel.

Yet I also persisted in making a sculptural object out of clay, this time for an exhibition. It was presented at Linden New Art in Naarm Melbourne, as part of three exhibitions curated around sound art practices. I promised myself that this would be the last attempt at working through this idea. This time, it would not be a recreation of the flute/cane but instead the indent of a walking stick, much the same as my grandfather’s. The object was accompanied by a sound composition taking a sample from the main melody of the song my grandfather played. This melody was then put through an echo effect and played on loop, filling the darkened space (figure 16).

After installing the work, I bumped into curator, artist and writer Fayen d’Evie. We had been talking about collaborating for some time as we have common concerns with the sonic realm and a shared interest in the echo. I mentioned to Fayen that I was not sure if this iteration of the cane/flute work was articulating what I was trying to say. More to the point, it seemed to me that the narrative, this personal narrative, was functioning beyond ‘longing’ or ‘nostalgia’, words used to describe the work on more than one occasion. Nostalgia is also a word used, often dismissively, to describe the emotional connection between the migrant in the diaspora and ‘grief’ for her ‘homeland’. This was not effect I was after, but I understood why the work was interpreted thus. Taken away from its context, the object could only speak of loss and only attempt to explain.

A few weeks later I met up with Fayen and she proposed that she would like to commission me to create an actual, working cane/flute for her. A functional version that would aid her as she became increasingly ‘blindish’, as she describes her ocular condition. 

With this task at hand I began to recreate my grandfather’s cane, this time as a functional object. Instead of using the default adjustable perforations of a traditional aluminium walking stick I sourced materials and spoke to others about ways to create intentional flute holes, measuring and positioning them in a way so as to would ‘tune’ the object to the specific scale of the flute melody in the song my grandfather played, while at the same time being a strong functional aid.

The iteration described above produced a prototype. The collaboration with Fayen d’Evie is an ongoing one, involving further discussion and tuning. We invited Chilean/Australian researcher and musician of folk music of South America, Bryan Phillips to help test the object. As Phillips, members of his family and I played the flute and make sounds, we connected with this signal, (re)telling the story and somatically engaging with the sounds from a flute/cane tuned to a familiar sonic register. I then, took the sound from the recordings taken that afternoon and created a composition using the melodies played by Bryan. The short sound work is composed from short segments repeated. Bryan breath and somentimes voice is also audible amongst the sound of the cane/flute (sound below).

The Cane/Flute work has since moved on to have other lives and relationships. In October of 2020 it travelled to Aoteroa for the exhibition Speaking Surfaces curated by Charlotte Huddleston at St. Paul's Street Gallery. Alongside the cane I also presented a short compostition using sampled fragments recorded the afternoon Phillips, his family and I got together to test the cane as a flute. During its time at St. Paul's Street Gallery the object was moved by the curator throughout the gallery, and in this way shown as a functional object. Further to this way of focusing on its functionality, as part of the exhibition programming Cane/Flute was played by sound artist Rachel Shearer who also plays the taonga pūoro, the wind instruments of Māori people. The sound which Shearer creates in the piece titled Koauau Tokotoko almost ceremonially calls on vast and layered spaces I never anticipated exisiting as I drilled holes into the metal tubing in my studio (sound below).

As mentioned in the previous chapter, King Tubby used the echoplex machine in order to overlay an echo and distort his sound. In stretching it, doubling it, layering it, he was alluding to an original signal, one located across the trans-Atlantic waters from Jamaica —where dub originates. To Tubby this the root sound became an important device to maintaining a conversation within the diaspora. Academic Karen Barad’s explorations into diffraction and its workings become very useful within the context of dub and this project. As she describes it, the echo works through the dispersal and diffraction of an original signal. This passing down is an echoing of knowledge not as a set pattern, but rather as an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling.Barad.168.

In working to make the cane/flute object resonate as an instrument, it became clear that it was the relation and the function as a carrier of the narrative that gave the work reason. It is what Le Guin was referring to in her ‘carrier bag theory’ of science fiction at work. Further to this, Louis Chude-Sokei explains resonances as working as echoic repetitions of affective responses, doing so through correspondences and affinities.L. Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).169. In Chude-Sokei’s understanding, reason implies disjunction, which is the active binary separation of subject and object, while resonance involves their conjunction.Ibid.

The space in which this cane/flute becomes resonant and articulate is not one of transcendence; the object sitting still and being examined was precisely the place where subject and object become separated for individual interpretation. Which is to say, Cane/Flute becomes articulate when it stops being an artefact and becomes active in its functions, those of support and resonance. Moreover, these functions are inseparable from each other. The physical support and the sonic instrument, the object and its multiple use and values—culture, language, knowledge—can never be relegated to exist in allocated singularities or proscribed uses or simplistic colonial narratives.

Now, with distance I can say that it is the cultural aspects that have been the driver for this work; the teaching, the passing on, the adding to the song, the adaptation of an object, one moment coming from another, an echoing in action then echoed through collaborative action with others. According to Barad’s concept of diffraction, there is no leaving the ‘old’ behind.Barad. There are, however, adaptations and interactions which begin from pre-existing positionalities and imperatives and drive the compulsion and intuition to continue adding to, passing on and sharing a narrative over time.

To position this strategy of diffraction in a view of a future timeline, Indonesia experimental band Senyawa has recently released a record with a narrative of the post-apocalyptic as point of departure, imagining a time in the future, perhaps post-pandemic and environmental collapse. This starting point for a musical approach is not one of lament or recounting ways in which the world is destroyed but a strategic reimagining.

The strategy that Senyawa propose is one of decentralisation. The release titled “Alkisah” enacts decentralisation by the releasing of an album – by 40 record labels around the world - for which each of the tracks is remixed by local artists thus reflecting the specific tastes of  the places in which this record is released.

In the words of writer Marianna Lis:

This act of decentralisation, I argue works similarly to the act of diffraction as defined by this project. Decentralisation in Senyawa's case creates a collective narrative of interrelated experimental music arstists and thinking through timelines and solidarities as the band picked the labels which would release the remixes themselves. Alkisah as a project gives voice to multiple projections demonstrating that specificity and collectivity can coexist at once and create new adaptive narratives.

In the documentary Out of the Mayan Tombs (figure 20), anthropologist David Matsuda retells a conversation that took place between himself and a local Mayan tomb artefact looter in Belize, Central America.

To draw a relationship between a semilla—a seed—and these ancestral artifacts is no flippant gesture. Seeds are important to Mayan culture, and not just as a dietary staple. Seeds—for example tz’ite (a red bean like seed), espadaña (a type of grass seed) and maize (corn)—are crucial characters symbolising the creation of human life, and thus perceptions of time and the ancestral, in the Mayan cosmology, as chronicled in the Popol Vuh narrative of Mesoamerica.Ilan Stavans, Popol Vuh, a Retelling (Brooklyn NY: Restless Books Inc., 2020).19.

Allen J. Christenson, Popol Vuh : The Sacred Book of the Maya (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).70.

The Popol Vuh is the telling of the Mayan Mesoamerican narrative as documented in Spanish by Father Ximénez in the 16thcentury as the K’iche’ people faced a future of cultural annihilation. There are many contemporary versions of the document, with varying degrees of colonialist standpoint.

  The perception that Mayan ancestors left semillas as gestures for their descendants is part of a narrative of relationality with the future, as they imagined the livelihoods of those still to come.

Of course, the loss of the artifacts depicting important characters and stories is regrettable, and a part of the local Indigenous community of Belize is engaged in a project of recovery of these mostly ceramic artifacts, as is shown later in the documentary. After all, these objects intended for a community of ancestors now go to collectors as part of a world-wide industry in which their cultural value is objective rather than subjective. But looters sell the artifacts out of a necessity caused by a poverty resulting from the conditions of colonisation itself. The objects thus sustain lives, much like maize does, and we cannot judge the looters of their own ancestral objects for resorting to this illegal occupation. This is very different from the ethical implications of the museological and anthropological context in which objects find themselves, far away from the place where they have a functionality and meaning.

I present this conversation because it is important in this project to engage with the complexities inherent in speaking about the origin or provenance of a cultural artifact or story, because in the meeting of timelines decisions are continuously made and ruptures or adaptations, intentional or otherwise, may occur.Christenson. Popl Vuh, 186. As the character described as a looter in the documentary implies in the short conversation, he has found a way to weave his activities into an ongoing narrative, a conversation with his ancestors in which he has active input. This is a narrative that is adapting and yet retaining its substance as the object becomes the seed. Thus the cultural artifact is in fact the orality—the method for providing an epistemological understanding capable of giving living functionality and logic to an object—rather than merely a material artifact.

The Popol Vuh narrative speaks of the process of creation as one that specifically allocated to the human the role of storyteller, aurality being of utmost importance for the creation of a successful human after a couple of failed attempts by the Gods:

This orality for the Indigenous people who inhabit the isthmus of Central America thus becomes a way to mediate and translate between the gods and ancestors, animals and the environment in the way of plants or hurricanes or earthquakes. In this light, it is not too far a stretch to conclude that the sonic phenomenon of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kulkulkan highlighted in the previous chapter falls into this role of communication. In the instance of the call of the quetzal bird, which is created within the chamber of the pyramid, the communication becomes one that is acoustic and sonic rather than verbal, and that echoes and reverberates across time.

Despite what knowledge contemporary and ever-evolving scientific and technological advancements such as carbon dating and other investigative methods provide about humans and their past, it is fair to state that humanity’s history, before it began to record itself by various forms still understood today, had mostly been approached by speculation and interpretation. Is there a possibility, given the time transpired, colonisation and cultural bias, that these speculations about our history and inter-relationships may be biased because of the ontological standpoint they are researched from?

When writing on paleolithic cave art, the well-regarded prehistorian and archaeologist Jean Clottes warns of the limitations and dangers of what he describes as deceptive empiricism of objectivity.J. Clottes, O.Y. Martin, and R.D. Martin, What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 2016).6. The empirical claim is that objectivity in research provides a freedom from any pre-existing hypotheses. For Clottes, claims that these objectivities are unbiased observations

Ancient caves help articulate a few concerns within this project, the echo itself being the main thread sonically present within natural cavernous habitats built from rocks. For the purpose of this chapter, the cave becomes important because it is where some of the earliest visual cultural material of human Ancestors all around the world has been found. It is in the caves that drawings of animals important to the humans which frequented them were drawn, and in the way of a visual echo, generation after generation returned to trace over these shapes to learn from those before.Barbara Ehrenreich, "‘Humans Were Not Centre Stage’: How Ancient Cave Art Puts Us in Our Place," The Guardian, Thu 12 Dec 2019 17.00 AEDTLast modified on Fri 10 Jan 2020 23.00 AEDT, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancient-cave-art-painting-lascaux-chauvet-altamira.

Sound wise, according to Clottes:

Understanding the important role of sound within past culture expands the way in which contemporary humans understand how their ancestors experienced themselves within the world. In “Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo In Archaeoacoustics”, researcher Annie Goh identifies the opportunity for archaeoacoustics—the specialised study of archaelogy via sound—to understand the multimodality of the past.Annie Goh, "Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics," Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017/07/03 2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339968.

The isolation of the visual has reflected hierarchies and standpoints which have proceded from racial, gender and geographical power relations. This bias has not just impeded what is reasearched - the visual rather the the sonic realm - but also how sound is researched when it is approached.

The echo as a sonic phenomenon needs to be contextualised within conversations around sound itself. To writers Michael Bull and Les Back, proponents of sound and its many contemporary dialogues, the visual has become a place of objectivity, one that can be traced back to Plato and the Age of Enlightenment, and within academia this objectivity has been transferred into the universal.Michael Bull, Les Back, and ProQuest, The Auditory Culture Reader, 2nd edition. ed. (London, New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2016).3. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the visual becomes the only way to attain an assumed purity of form as the prisoner leaves the cave, with its shadows and echoes, behind. In this way of thinking, the terms purity and universality become interchangeable, while at the same time being deeply rooted in Western epistemology.Ibid., 2. Although sound is also not exempt from binary judgements of purity in a Western context, there are rich approaches to looking at sound that work outside of this binary.

To understand the echo within this project is to see it as being methodology, metaphor, scientific and sonic phenomenon and aesthetic device. This research finds inspiration in Goh’s writings which takes feminist stand point theory— an awareness of the political postioning and knowledge system from which an approach to research is conducted —and Barad ‘s theory on diffraction and configures a new approach to understanding the sonic legacies of our ancestors and their implications for further possible understandings and imaginings. For Goh:

This understanding of ontological positioning is crucial to engaging with the understanding of sound within this project. An important example includes the work of sociologist Dr Monique Charles, who writes on Grimes’ music and contextualises it within a genealogical framework traceable across continents and centuries from Africa before the transatlantic slave trade to the housing estates of the UK.M. Charles, 'Hallowed Be Thy Grime?: A Musicological and Sociological Genealogy of Grime Music and Its Relation to Black Atlantic Religious Discourse' (#Hbtg?) (University of Warwick, 2016). 355 Another example is Dylan Robinson, who writes from an Indigenous standpoint about an Indigenous logic of sound, from a specific positionality, and considers aspects such as composition and reasons for dissemination. Robinson's theorisation takes into account a particular set of spatial-temporal understandings which operate outside of a Western epistemological binary of purity and representation.Robinson.8. While these genealogical utterances may seem opaque for those not privy to the language or ‘family’, they do exist. They are present and articulate although they may be disturbed or diffracted as described above. While this research has sound as its main focus, the filmed and improvised ghost performances of Brian Fuata’s work embodies the above ideas. Fuata’s approach is very influential in this project, particularly in regard to the opaque and that which one cannot see.

It must have been 1997, Pauline Hanson was surfacing as the mainstream face of white supremacy in Queensland, Australia. An antiracist movement was formed to respond to this new manifestation of ongoing settler colonialism. As someone whose family had been directly affected by racism, I attended the protests. I was nineteen years old, and had been in the country for three years after escaping civil war in El Salvador. The antiracism movement was made up of mostly young people like me. I felt I could contribute more than just attending the protest and, gathering all my confidence, decided to attend some organising meetings, travelling from almost an hour away by bus from my parent’s house in the suburbs.

The meetings were always held in different places, usually university rooms booked in the evening after classes. Strategies were discussed. To direct action or not to direct action? Where should the ‘movement’ go next? Who should speak at the next rally? What should go on the flier? Who would distribute the fliers and where?

I do not remember the conversations ever addressing the self-education of those present—those being all middle class and white, except for me. It seemed that racism was conceived by the group as primarily an abstract, optical matter. Which is to say, there was hardly any discussion ofthe real effects of the thing we were protesting. I felt very lonely sitting at these meetings where my accented input was received with special curiosity and excitement, followed by a palpable lack of interest in what I was actually saying.

One evening, as we sat for another meeting in another university, a person arrived that I had not seen before, who sat next to me. This person was Brian Fuata. After meetings we would chat about what had taken place, in solidarity with each other’s critiques of what played out before us. The complexity of what racism is actually built upon and its effects could never be understood without the knowledge of the nuanced lives of those who live it, and there was no room for this in that ‘movement’. As well-intentioned as everyone was, and as optically present as Brian and I were, our input could only be limited to validating this flattening of our experience.

After our dabble with this inner-city activism, we both moved cities and countries and didn’t see each other again for more than ten years. In this time Brian had worked with Māori/Sāmoan artist Rosanna Raymond and the live art scene in London, and I had followed him from a distance on Myspace.

We encountered each other again in Sydney in 2002. A practicing artist now, I was there to check out artist Guillermo Gómez Peña’s The Museum of Fetishised Identities at the Performance Space The Museum of Fetishised Identities at Performance Space, on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation/Sydney. The work was presented as a five-hour tableau vivant that Gómez-Peña co-devised with a select group of local artists of various disciplines ThirdWorldNewsreel, “The Couple in the Cage – Trailer - TWN,” YouTube, accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLX2Lk2tdcw.. As I looked closer, I recognised Brian on stage raising a peeled banana to his mouth, slow and deliberate, eventually masticating the fruit into a specimen jar. Wearing a colonial hoop skirt hiked up to his armpits with his shoulders bare, the top half of his face was painted black, as if he was wearing a tribal animalia opera mask. Brian has since described his persona as that of a ‘Simian Ballerina’. In the performance he articulated interval movements of glitched Christian iconography before mounting a giant cross to somehow fuck it, climaxing to hang himself upside down. It was mesmerising.

I had followed Guillermo Gómez-Peña for some time, with particular interest in his work with Coco Fusco Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992-93). In this work the two artists perform everyday rituals as Indigenous peoples from an imaginary land, dressed in an amalgam of native exotica. It toured museums throughout Europe at the height of discourse on identity politics, playing on the history of colonial othering and objectification of the bodies and the everyday ‘doings’ of Black and brown people.

Back to Sydney, Gómez-Peña’s methodology of ‘composite identities’ consisted of locating and distilling from each collaborator their various identities, towards creating a series of physical phrases to represent each layer of chosen subjectivities. The choreography in the work was composed live as an improvised sampling of these set phrasal gestures—repeated, looped almost, in cycles of varying tempos and energetic force. Brian and I have spoken before about how we saw ourselves back when we first met as ‘inner-city activists’; to be singled out without subjectivity even in these places of change was destabilising for our sense of self. This performance was its antithesis. Rendering the psychological space into the physical gesture, Brian’s movements were at once familiar and abstract.

In Cruising with Wrong Solo (2010) performed as part of Brian’s collaboration with Agatha Gothe-Snape at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), the format they employed was a type of guided activity. Brian led a group spinal roll that bled into the act of walking around the gallery. Participants were encouraged to look into each other’s eyes as they passed each other’s bodies, inevitably aware of the dense activated space between two people as they pass one another.

The work is charged. The participants find themselves in fact cruising. The act of presence itself comes to the fore as the main mode, and this is when I see Fuata’s project beginning to exist in a realm of relationality. In his work, the relational is a present space: it is humour, a break from solemnity, the opposite of the self-consciousness (for performer and audience) of conceptual performance art. In Brian’s relational space there is a radicality that those present do not experience if what they are searching for is optical cues.

This is political work. It is funny and it is direct, it is familial and warm, a type of hosting that refuses to give us what we think we see; that is, Brian, a brown man, is refusing to perform. Instead, he twists the space of expectation and allows us to live in that very moment beyond conceptions of what we—the viewer—are looking at, because we are immersed in nuance.

Brian Fuata’s performances usually include a clearing of space in the middle of the room. Within it there can be a chair, a bed sheet, a phone, paper, words, a glass of wine, a glass of water, a laptop or a ladder, all acting much in the same way as theatre props. In the case of his more text-based email performances, it is the format of electronic correspondence that he seizes to repurpose into a type of stage—an audience created in the Bcc field bearing witness to his interaction with those in To. The original function of these are everyday objects is transformed as the ghost activates them, lifting them, manifesting this haunting before our very eyes.

In the performance for NIRIN WIR: 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), Brian elegantly guides us, dragging a large white sheet up the grand staircase of the Museum of Contemporary Art (figure 21). In a comic transformation, midway he turns to face the audience below and on beat says, “Met Ball.” He continues, and we follow him into a gallery where he improvises using various artworks as points of narrative departure. He gleans text from Tony Albert’s Do Not Frack the NT (2020), then bellows “STOP NT FRACKING / FRACKING FRACKING FRACKING ENERGY / FRACKING ENERGY …” on loop, running wild around the gallery room. His energy attracts other gallery patrons from different levels of the building, screaming more lines he derives from Erkan Özgen’s Wonderland (2016)” “DAD DAD DAD—SON / DAD DAD DAD—SON / SON SON SON—GUN …” It feels like he screams forever. Suddenly, an announcement on the gallery intercom, a woman’s voice gently calling his name as if rousing him from sleep, “Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian.” A mic on a stand seems to magically appear. Fuata interrupts his rage, tentatively approaches the mic with affected disbelief. “Yes?” he says calmly. And so begins a dialogue between the artist and the gallery building. Eventually Brian ascends a ladder with mic in hand. Positioned under the sheet, he becomes Ghost. Up there, as an apparitional monument, his sonorous voice attempts to sing-speak ‘Unchained Melody’, the song made famous in the film Ghost (1990), but he is stuck looping on a single line, “Oh my love, my darling ... I hunger for your love.”. It is dramatic and hilarious. Then his phone alarm rings. “Thanks for coming,” the ‘real’ Fuata says. The performance ends.

If we go back to thinking about movements, I can imagine how this performance would confront those expecting something a bit more exotic and familiar in the way of visual language from a brown body—something ‘purer’. Brian Fuata presents the intangible ,requiring the viewer to immerse themselves, let go and think deeper. Perhaps this is one of the reasons he uses either poetic tropes of repetition or theatrical effects such as characterising vocal and speaking registers. The allusion of a formalising structure or an everyday dramatis personae creates a sense of safety—as he wanders from one part of the building to the other it is these repeated anchoring words or rhythmic roving stages of dramatic effects that contain (and comfort) the viewer in the face of the random, improvised chaos.

After all the history of the scientific parading and measuring and prodding of brown and Black bodies, there still seems to be expectations of ‘authenticity’ for the way the body is presented. There are even ways materials are used by Black, brown, Indigenous peoples that are considered more acceptable, more virtuous. These expectations do not take into account how the displaced and the diasporic have had to devise ways to keep genealogical continuum while adapting to changing surrounding conditions.

There seems to be a safety in deferring to these simplistic and flattening expectations, in re-enacting their violence. There is nothing wrong with addressing these acts of course—this is crucial knowledge. Demonstrable of such concerns was a recent online performance where Brian astutely painted his body in grey scale to mimic the history of Black and brown bodies on screen. And of course, history is alluded to in his ghost. Paradoxically, as Brian becomes the ghost by covering his body—in plain view of the audience—with a white sheet the, unseen is called upon (figure 22).

The ghost is a visitor from the beyond, from a realm always present but never seen and yet it overlays every interaction, it picks up chairs, it laughs, it reads from a phone with a shaky and bass voice. The ghost reminds us that the politics of the past are still embedded everywhere. In each and every space. Dripping off the walls.

Each of Brian Fuata's performances, via email or IRL, are different in the sequence of hand and body gestures and/or word play repeated. This repetition creates a layer of playful poetic anchoring to the work. Equally as comforting is the delineation and setting of boundaries with tape on the ground or by attendants sitting in such a way as to make space for Brian, not dissimilar to street busking spectatorship.

By employing the trope of the ghost, Brian directs attention away from the racialised body and highlights the forces which construct it, taking the focus away from the human. Caribbean writer Sylvia Wynter describes coloniality as  taking focus away from notions which previously defined difference, such as:

Much like Wynter encapsulates, Brian’s ghost work brings forth the proposition that there exist a plethora of relations that dissolve the singular paradigm that judges based solely on race class and propriety. What at first seems like conceptual performance art because of its visual sparseness, creates instead conditions for the hosting of a relational space. Vā is the Pasifika concept of the space of relationality. Vā has many forms, it exists in conviviality, in ceremony and is commonly depicted in tattoo patterns as the space between the inked lines. When looked at in the context of Vā, Brian’s performance logic begins to take form.

Brian utilises humour and engages with the everyday surrounding context by using props, through email, ringing his mother mid-performance, complimenting an audience member on their scarf, saying hello to a person he recognises or welcoming a new arrival into the room. While being genuine social connections, these are also technical devices of performance making—of world building—that engage in the familial while more and more unexpected things begin to take place. Brian pauses at intervals and returns to the audience with a new word, phrase or movement, responding to a prompt, building upon and repeating it until another pause calls the next movement.

The space Brian highlights is complex. It’s radical in the fact that it is housed albeit temporarily in the zone of an art gallery, where his register of conviviality is not usually on display nor in operation and is, in many ways, taboo regarding its anti-seriousness and lack of an overt ‘conceptual’ appearance. His conscious refusal to participate in the air of elitism so common in gallery spaces is witnessed in his serial titling of works as apparitional charlatan. Furthermore, at the beginning of each performance Brian sets an alarm for exactly twenty minutes. This time is strictly adhered to. As soon as the alarm rings everything stops. The performance is over. The ‘work’ is done. Brian’s ghost situates the gallery as a complex of multiple and simultaneous, visible and invisible economies of labour and subjectivities, which in turn pixelates the art institution into a space of ongoing/incoming process, impulse, immediacy and emotion.

Brian Fuata’s methodology is one of rigorous and generous opacity. There are many ways in which artists engage with culture, queerness, race and gender. Some seek to educate, some use the artistic platform to engage, reimagine, reappropriate. Some seek to subvert the colonialist gaze through gesture. Other artists choose refusal as a strategy. Brian’s work exists in the present, and in its improvisational nature, the repetition of words and actions, sets up a pattern and tempo to engage with in the moment. Not unlike the loops in techno music on a dancefloor, relationality in his work generates rhythm out of the everyday and creates a sense of joy and potency.

Brian reminds us that the institutional building itself is political, that there remains steady hums of old anthropological understandings of race and difference playing in its architecture, echoes quieter but no different than those more audible in the politics going on at the antiracism meeting where we first encountered each other. Brian Fuata connects with these echoes and places them within a conversational context for the viewer to see that they are there as we conduct our lives amongts them.

In 2019 I was invited to participate in Shapeshifters (sound below), a public symposium focused on new forms of curatorial research, hosted by Monash University. I was commissioned to create a work or give a presentation of this doctoral research to date. Rather than a talk or a physical art piece, I chose to present a sound montage work to a seated audience (figure 23), which was presented in between talks by other presenters within the symposium. The aim was for sound itself, in all its potential iterations as outlined below, to envelop the seated listeners in its immersive and communicative workings.

The untitled sound essay work was composed of short samples of audio sourced from various platforms including YouTube, radio, SoundCloud downloads, DJ’d music and field recordings. These segments were recontextualised and edited into a narrative which engaged with conversations around sound and its socio-political implications. As a medium, it was approached intentionally for its potential to question and critique contexts from the perspective of diasporic, Black and brown people.

The materials used for the sound essay have many provenances within cultural hierarchies, and placing them together allowed for connections to be made between the aesthetic and conceptual potential of each of these forms. The voice of Octavia Butler can be heard, as well as the voices of the techno group Underground Resistance, my son and I conversing, Indigenous activist Gary Foley, African American writer Toni Morrison, as well as writer Louis Chude-Sokei and contemporary French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. The main thread within the sound essay is the role of sound in constructing and envisioning futures with understandings around multiple timelines.

This work had intersectionality as an approach, thinking through the overlaps in discussions while also maintaining a focus on what it means to imagine sound within the context of its functionality outside of its formalist qualities alone. Robinson’s description of ‘difficult music’, as I discuss in chapter one, is not relegated to music that is necessarily purposely abrasive for formalist concerns alone. In Robinson’s concluding remarks about his research in the field of music, he notes: 

To engage with this approach to sound is to engage with its unsettling complexity, with its holding of multiplicity in its subject matter. For this project, this concept of ‘difficult music’ is one that is comfortable with incommensurability and tensions, as opposed to essentialisms and simplifications or purely superficially disruptive aesthetics.

The content of the sounds and music chosen in this piece are not always easy to listen to, nor is the quality of the found sounds sampled. The words that are contributed through the voices of those sampled in the piece are conversational and often politically challenging and confronting, as they discuss or allude to the necessity of their work in their chosen artistic or activist fields.

By using the words of artists and writers in the way of the essay format, I was able to focus on histories of sound within the atmospheric context in which they were said, thus reflecting a political context which opened new possibilities of ways to engage with sound as a medium. This piecing together of overlapping histories thus makes reference to the project’s influences, potential cross-overs and senses of commonality, as well as differences within people and formats of sonic composition and communication. Most importantly, this work brings together and gives form to the aural as an ongoing narrative in itself. It does this by presenting a series of concerns, which include the recognition of conversations that still need to be addressed, responsibilities that still need to be acknowledged, and sound’s many iterations as an artistic format.

To return to Le Guin’s theory of the novel, sound in this project behaves in much the same way as the carrier bag: a narrative artifact, a substance, a container of interrelations and narratives. As we clapped together, my grandfather was passing down a language, a form of connection not just to him but also to our ancestors, a story much like the Indigenous myths that also made up my ontological education. This genealogy is passed through relationality, from my grandfather to me. In the context of my practice as a DJ, the record bag and, digitally, the USB stick loaded with Mp3 files, becomes this carrier. Each track to be played, pulled out and blended into another tells a complex story, one that can be enjoyed without necessarily being intellectually perceived.

To grasp the relationship between humans and sonification as a narrative form is an important aspect of understanding that the collective, ancestral and environmental are a crucial part of ongoing ancestral narratives outside of the colonial setting. 

To live in the diaspora is to hold and nurture knowledges, much like Octavia Butler’s fragment of a vessel. The ever-shifting pieces available to the colonised and its diasporic form have constructed narratives—such as the echo effect in dub music—which are crucial and political in climates that actively engage in cultural dispossession. It is through engaging with diffractions of knowledge via sounds that I, as an artist in the Salvadoran diaspora, am able to add to the composition. These understandings are what allow me as an artist to allow my contributions to culture be a process of engaging with the world, much like the intentionality given to the human in the Popul Vuh. It allows me to add and subtract and acknowledge its elements, sometimes with the opacity of Brian Fuata’s practice, in immaterial and intuitive ways that are almost undetectable, because they don’t need to be seen to exist. As Fuata traces realities and timelines present within the spaces he haunts as the ghost, he both highlights their presence and constructs from—and within—those spaces something both ancient and new. These articulations exist in ways that are both perceptible and imperceptible, often requiring in the witnessing moment a peeling off of their complex, layered and dissonant stories, like Octavia Butler’s vessel.

Narratives aural and oral find ways to articulate themselves, to engage with the world within new circumstances, adapting and giving meaning to new contexts, such as with my grandfather’s cane/flute or, in a more pragmatic way, la semilla. What does it mean, however, to engage with culture in this way in a new place, within a different environment and culturally complex circumstances? In the following chapter, I focus on the approaches and ethics with which this new contextualisation functions in the specificity of settling on the colonised and unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations, whose land I work within as a settler.

The surfaces from which a sound signal bounces—the walls of the cave, for example—are a very important variable in how its diffraction as an echo manifests. Following the last chapter, which established the persistence of diasporic narratives in both the aural and oral form, this chapter discusses the implications of the specificity of the surfaces within the context in which I work. I will be looking specifically at the politics of feminism, culture and race. Further, this chapter looks to experiments and developments in sound work as the practice has moved to explore socio-cultural and environmental aspects in both the medium itself as well as the conditions in which it is made.

I begin this chapter by establishing the limitations within reductive and rhetorical representations, and their failures when it comes to engaging with themes around the complexity of race and politics. I specifically focus on unquestioned notions of how multiplicities are understood, and establish a need for better approaches to engaging complexity within the reading of the work of the diaspora. This chapter returns to the adaptive narrative via the work of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa in order to put forward the case that orality and aurality can be understood as emancipatory practices. The chapter then guides the reader towards the importance of specificity in this project, locating it within the Latin American diaspora though the work of anthropologists, filmmakers, writers and researchers whose work is concerned with the important mythological figure of La Llorona/Siguanaba that is common to cultures throughout the Latin American continent and some of the Caribbean.

This chapter grounds the story of La Llorona within my own sound works and discusses sonification as an artistic approach through the technique of looping in DJing, as well as reverberation as it is understood in reference to soundsystem culture. This project positions itself within a specific lineage of sound philosophy and sound practice, while at the same time making a contribution to the sound art canon. Most importantly, this chapter discusses what it means to make work as a settler, and the considerations that I take into account in order to engage with the surfaces, cultural and physical that my sound bounces from. ­­­­­

It was the late 1990s and I, a young woman, had become interested in feminism. Along with issues to do with race, I understood its urgency. I attended a few meetings to organise marches and volunteered to take part in the organising committee of an Australia-wide feminist student conference. These places, I have found, are the juncture where rhetoric, discussion and action meet and often clash. These experiences have come to be formative moments in my cultural and political education. These experiences have come to be formative moments in my cultural and political education.

As  already recounted in the previous chapter Ongoing Narrative, it became clear that my voice was not required so much as my presence. Nothing made the superficiality of the nature of my presence clearer than when, as the artist in the group, I was asked to design the poster for an upcoming conference to be hosted in the city I lived in, a task that I was initially enthused to engage with. There was a meeting of the fifteen or so organisers. The committee discussed the image that should go on the poster. It was important to the group to move away from what they saw as essentialist notions of womanhood, so the suggestions flowed in a conversation that read something like the following:

“Lady of Lycra …”
“Surfer chick,” someone else recommended.
“Professional,” offered another voice.
“Power vixen,” another recommendation.
“Cyber-femme,” another.

As I took down notes on the possibilities of what a woman could be, I felt a small inkling that something was missing. At the same time as the conversation progressed, we recognise that that it would be a very difficult task to choose only one of these women to be represented as no one could agree on one single representation.

In the end, I had to come up with a solution myself. I drew the body of a woman that reflected the instructions given to me. A woman whose body and experience were so different from my own appeared before my very eyes. She was a thin, sexy, blonde and woman dressed in figure hugging Lycra, comically carrying a surfboard, a computer and a briefcase.

I took this new image to the meeting to find that no-one was happy with the design. It seemed too ‘busy’. The committee was unable to agree on what a ‘simple’ image of a woman should be. The figure of woman, it was suggested, should become abstracted and in that abstraction she would speak for all of us. The aim was not to leave anyone out. Deflated, but with a sense of humour, I made an outline of a figure, not unlike the one used to signal ‘female’ on the toilet sign. This neutral image, I suggested, could be different shades of the colour we had all picked at a meeting, a type of pastel orange, almost a pink. After a heated discussion on whether this pink was too pink or more of a peach tine, and whether it was un-feminist to use pink, the committee agreed with the idea. Copies of the image of this universal woman in a pinkish hue would be arranged on the A3 sized poster to be printed and distributed on university campuses around Australia.I searched all the avenues for an image of this poster in order to present it here but I could not find it.

Here she was, the woman who represented every woman. It was at this moment that I realised that while no one could agree on who would be represented, no one seemed to mind that an understanding of race and culture or class was lacking in the initial conversation where different types of women were identified. In fact, this was the only subject around which disagreement was absent. In this instance, the one defining factor that would make a woman free was, it seemed to me, the privilege of having choices in regard to hobbies and interests.

The significance of this anecdote lies in the possibilities that this, and many other similar scenarios, do not have room for. It seemed there was no imagination or tools for engaging with other perspectives such as mine—a young migrant—or, most importantly, the perspectives of First Nations’ voices of the Yuggera people on whose lands these meetings were taking place. Aileen Moreton-Robinson speaks directly to these omissions in her landmark work Talking Up to the White Woman (2000), in which she discusses the problems within the Australian feminist movement. When it comes to considerations around race and standpoints outside of notions of equality, Moreton-Robinson specifically highlights concerns to do with Indigenous knowledge and perspective.A. Moreton-Robinson, Talkin' up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism (University of Queensland Press, 2000).

I have often over the years thought back to what the best outcome could have been in the poster scenario. Yes, I could have drawn myself, however, within this space I only knew myself in my role as a stand in – a rhetorical representative for a diversity quota. I did not understand at the time how even though everyone at these meetings was volunteering, I felt like I had a great opportunity to speak and yet when I spoke I felt greatly disempowered. In hindsight, it is sad to admit that I believed that this is what agency felt like.

A little more than 20 years have passed and conversations around difference and diversity remain just as urgent now, it is promising that the conversations in regards to the topic of diversity are more public. Fellow Salvadoran-Australian Tania Cañas, is a writer, community organiser and artist has made one of many contributions to the conversation within the Australian cultural setting through her work on the in her text titled Diversity is a White word.https://www.artshub.com.au/education/news-article/opinions-and-analysis/professional-development/tania-canas/diversity-is-a-white-word-252910  accessed: 10/8/2020

What I learnt from this time was that feminism as I had experienced it in the 1990s had a White Australian specificity and provenance which lacked an imaginary outside of itself. Another lesson from this, with further reaching repercussions for me, was that I would need to become confident in my position, my standpoint. I needed to create my own nuanced ethic where I could speak my languages as they evolved, on my own terms, outside of the struggle with assimilation into the dominant White culture and colonial attitudes, which prevented me from speaking out at those meetings.

Assimilation is a colonial force which has  been upheld by the Australian state as an important instrument for colonial submission to language and culture. Its most damaging effects are experienced by First Nations peoples via state policies of cultural and land dispossession. Assimilation becomes the politic of submission through an imposed cultural framework, and these expectations are also imposed on the migrant. Assimilation is also one of the pivotal forces for the creation of a centre/periphery binary of exclusion and inclusion. In other words, assimilation relies on binaries of belonging. These boundaries between these binaries are ever shifting and on a practical level are intuited rather than explicitly demarcated. These boundaries and spaces are what Feminist and race theorist Sara Ahmed describes as a phenomenology of whiteness, a term she uses to as a way to acknowledge and bring that which does not get seen, as the background to social action to the surface and as a way to approach critique.Ahmed 17. It is a space where the body of the marginal subject in its non-white difference becomes out of place, an outsider, a disoriented presence. This project is primarily about challenging this phenomenology by finding strategies for creating agency and or creating spaces for this agency to thrive, if momentarily.

This research has sought to refine for myself,  an artistic language that is relational and generative in it’s approach rather than reactive to disorienting spaces in which I have found and will continue to find myself. However, to do so I wanted to find ways which would be critical and grounded on a complex approach to knowledge and for this I have needed to understand the narrative and formal palette available to me.

Édouard Glissant speaks of his theorisation of ‘errantry’ a word which he takes from the French language in which he writes and uses it for its meaning which describes the navigation, or movement of a person from one place to the other. This meaning links it to a way to relate to the world that is neither apolitical nor inconsistent with the will to identity, which he sees after all, as nothing other than the search for freedom within particular surroundings.Glissant., 20.Errantry, for Glissant, is a way to find agency in  one’s shifting and multiple relations with the world. This way of imagining the diasporic experience is one that moves beyond the notions around ‘looking back’ to a ‘root’ or judgements based on authenticity to an ‘original’ culture or cultural essence.

Despite different contexts and new places, myths travel from generation to generation, transmitting a set of values and imaginaries. For the West, Greek and Latin mythologies have become the formative and pervasive form of constructing analogies and building scaffolds for philosophical, psychological and cultural production. It has indeed been difficult to write this research without addressing the great Mediterranean myths written, in Plato’s case, in the 5th century BCE. In the case of Latin America, there are also a set of myths of pre-Columbian origin that carry that also carry longstanding cultural meaning and value. The myth of La Llorona is one such example, and one told to children from a very young age.

The narrative of La Llorona, as she is known generically throughout the Americas, is told in El Salvador, Central America, like this: Sihuehuet—Beautiful woman in Nahuatl—was the wife of the son of God Tlaloc—The Nahuatl god of rain and lightning in Mesoamerica—who, upon finding out about Sihuehet’s affair whilst married to his son, cast her out and thenceforth changed her name to Sihuanaba/Siguanaba—the ugly woman. The myth I was told by my family and older friends is a tale of a wailing woman—hence, the name La Llorona, the literal word for weeping, wailing, crying woman. La Siguanaba has with very beautiful long black hair who is always found close to a river at night. The river is crucial to the myth as it is to the water (the site of their imminent death) that she guides the men who are so seduced by her beautiful figure. As her back is always facing those walking by, what is seen is always a beautiful figure with long glossy hair. This mysterious woman alone in the dark becomes irresistible  to men who find themselves walking towards her, Sihuehet turns around to reveal her terrifyingly ugly face. Nevertheless, there are things men can do to resist her strong pull of seduction:

The myth of La Llorona has changed from one firmly based in Indigenous folklore, to a reflection of colonial and misogynist views of womanhood. For writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, the endurance of this narrative as a myth over time becomes a feminist concern, a way to rework and reshape the figure of the Latin woman within the Latin American community and, in the diasporic context, within the context of the South-West of the USA. This reconfiguring exists, I argue, as an intentional approach that is analogous with the natural workings of oral mythology. Which is to say, every time the myth is told it changes according to the subjectivity and sensibilities of the teller, sometimes even changing the meaning of the myth all together.

Anzaldúa’s writing around La Llorona engages in the act of telling, not so much the symbolism and representation but a driver for the  possibilities for the discursive act itself, being an inspiration, as she describes it  this call to respond is symbolized by la Llorona, whose cry initiates my will.Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro, Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Duke University Press, 2015) 11  La Llorona was to be a book edited by Anzaldúa however only the outline of chapters and contributors was completed before Anzaldúa passed away. Nevertheless Anzaldúa’s identification of the importance of the myth and its significance for the diaspora as well as its feminist implications has provided encouragement and a critical support to this project and it has inspired many others. In, fact I found out about this book through a young Latin diaspora feminist women’s group in Naarm, Melbourne.

I too had recognised the importance of the myth of La Llorona – and as she is known in El Salvador,  La Siguanaba, not only because it was an important part of my growing up and my connection to the culture I had been brought up in, but also because I have come to understand it very differently as an adult; A myth played out on the body and perceptions of what it means to be a ‘good’ woman.Mirna I. Carillo, “La Siguanaba Haunts with Bravery and Doubts: Second-Generation Salvadoran Women” (University of California San Diego, 2011), accessed 24/11/2020, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nr6c9nt.

I returned to La Siguanaba in my own sound work within a quadraphonicFour channels speakers positioned at four corners of a room with the audience usually sitting inside the reach of the four speakers. live sound performance as part of an event curated by Liquid Architecture titled ‘A Polyphonic Social’. Liquid Architecture is an Australian  arts organisation with a specific focus and programming around sound and the many dialogues within the field. This event was presented in the Magdalene Laundry of the ex-Abbotsford Convent, Naarm Melbourne, in 2019. I made this improvisation based work in collaboration with Bryan Phillips. The focus was on creating a singular narrative. Rather than utilising the voices of others, usually sampled, this time the voice used was mine, as was the music played.  The piece was twenty minutes in duration and comprised polyrhythmic loops in repetition, taken from different sources including some made by Phillips, including prepared reggaetonReggaeton is a contemporary rhythm based music from Latin America with a Caribbean provenance. rhythms and samples of various sounds including field recordings.  Whilst the audience sat in the middle of the room, Phillips improvised with sequencers and a multitrack machine that controlled the direction of the sound around each of the four speakers.

The performance began with live percussion: the banging of pots and pans as influenced by  the cacerolazo, the sonic protest device used in Latin America and in particular, in Chile. We did not know this at the time, but pertinently our performance took place half an hour before the massive Chilean demonstrations of 2019 began in protest with the high cost of living and inequality.

In addition to these sounds, I used my voice to tell my own version of the myth of La Siguanaba in the form of a poem recited to the repetitive sound of water while washing, utilised to create textural aspects to the sound. This element of the work was woven into the story of the venue where the performance took place. The Magdalen Laundry, as the name suggests, was a place where the sheets and the clothes of those housed within the complex, which included single mothers and children born within its walls many years before its current iteration as an arts complex, would be laundered. We were in many ways surrounded by a place of water and lives not unlike the life of La Siguanaba. In this work I sought to call on both stories, in a gesture not of lament but of acknowledgement.

Academic and member of the Salvadoran diaspora in the USA, Karina Zelaya, chronicles the history of various Salvadoran myths of Indigenous provenance. These myths are located specifically within the literary history of El Salvador within the 20th century, and Zelaya reflects on the continued grappling with their relationship to the First Nations Peoples of Cuzcatlán.The Nahuatl name for what is now El Salvador. In Zelaya’s detailed outline, each writer who retells the myth changes and omits aspects in a reflection of their own political sensibilities or those of El Salvador at a given time.Karina Lissette Zelaya, “Cuzcatlán Reappropriated: Indigenous Myth in the Construction of Salvadoran National Identity During the 20th Century” (Ph.D., University of California, Davis, 2013), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Within the context of the 21st century, La Siguanaba is reappropriated and given a new contemporary relevance in the Guatemalan supernatural horror film La Llorona of 2019.  In consultation with Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchu, Jayro Bustamante’s film is spoken in both Spanish and Mayan-Caqchickel Maya-Ixil (figure 24). The film is set in the aftermath of the brutal civil war of the 1980's in Guatemala. La Llorona appears at an opulent home as the new house keeper of a now aging high-ranking military war criminal responsible for the massacring of Mayan peoples. In the Bustamante’s film water, like in the original myth, acts as a carrier of grief and takes on a central role as the house floods. This flooding takes place at the same time as the military patriarch of the house faces a trial which is attended by a large group of First Nations, Mayan women. A multitude of Lloronas in their collective grieving and demands for punity for the reprehensible crimes commited.

In the film La Llorona is taken away from the context of the seductress, the bad woman, the bad mother. This is a feminist gesture as the subjectivity of La Llorona's grief is centred and collectivised and placed within a socio-political context.

In El Salvador, still in Central American and closer to my experience, despite bloody massacres and war and the myth of absence in contemporaneous notions of culture Indigenous languages, and people live.Carillo.p2 In this same way so do the descentants of African slaves brought by the Spanish.

The purpose of my engagement with the figure of La Siguanaba, however, is not to claim Indigenous identity for myself. I have learnt to be comfortable with the incommensurability of the parts that make me, as a Salvadoran in the diaspora and a settler in Australia. Anzaldúa describes the moment when a person is forced to negotiate the cracks between realities, and refers to ways to navigate what she describes as a switching between assimilation/acquiescence to the dominant culture and isolation/preservation of our ethnic cultural integrity.Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro

Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Duke University Press, 2015).79. While I may not agree with Anzaldúa’s view of the concept of mestizaje.A racial colonial construct that means different things in different areas of Latin America, but one founded on miscegenation, a way to remove Indigenous blood. as an emancipatory identity, I concur with the need to find ways to create spaces to articulate agency and to add to ongoing ancestral narratives as they have adapted, outside of the exhausting but pragmatic binary which Anzaldúa identifies.

To engage with a significant oral or aural narrative is to consider its new surroundings and environments, and for it to have continued life and consequence, and to contribute to its new context. Within this chapter, the story, the myth, the sound itself thereby becomes the echo, as it adapts to its new surroundings. 

Building on previous chapter discussions on the echo, where the echo is presented as a return of a sound influenced by diffraction, this part of the research identifies the technique of looping in DJ’ing as having the same ‘returning’ characteristics . Looping, be it of a voice or the sound of an instrument, is the act of digitally via DJ hardware, or manually via the use of two vinyl records, isolating a segment of a track, a song and then repeating it. The purpose of looping is to repeat this isolated sound in order to create an ongoing beat, or to mix one song into another by maintaining a steady simple rhythm as a foundation for the next track to begin. A loop is often used to create a new track altogether.

Looping in sound creates a steady and comforting backbeat it is a technique I have used often within sound works in this research project. The repetition of a segment of familiar song repeated over and over creates a sense of comfort. As a metaphor, looping is a useful way to imagine this repetition as being selected intentionally or intuitively to maintain a connecting rhythm as a track is carried forth to the next. Looping in this research project becomes the act of taking segment and engaging with it, aggregating it, reshaping it and making something new, yet specific and familiar.

In this sound-led artistic project, the segments chosen to be looped are not so much a way to recover as a way to understand that, for those of us in the diaspora, or even those of us who are products of miscegenation as I am, we have to work with a fragment here, a piece there. This is not a lament because it is important here to acknowledge the privilege of both circumstances, in the case of the Anzaldúa’s framing of mestizaje and also in the case of the diaspora. It is important to acknowledge that there are possibilities within these spaces, just as each bar in the loop repeats to create a new track, blending into the next, reflecting new ways of understanding itself. The echo again, communicating with its signal while reconfiguring itself. This is a generative communication, one that creates space for possible permutations in its relationship to the signal of origin. It is also one that must constantly acknowledge its limitations within the incommensurability created by the colonial condition.

Sound theorist Julian Henriques’ writing on the phenomenon of reverberation and the way in which it lends itself to understanding sound and orality within the diaspora has been influential on this research project. For Henriques, reverberation is especially important in that it allows us to locate ourselves within our environment. Reverberation requires auditory vibrations of air, water and other media. Accordingly, reverberation becomes a way to describe and render surroundings within the sonic. The auditory world of the human subject extends 360 degrees around us, unlike our visual field.Julian Henriques in Bull.275. Resonance

Thus, sound, as part of an aural and oral tradition is experienced via reverberation. Reverberation holds a sound imprint of the process through which sound has adapted.  As a signal bounces around in new spaces it finds new ways for new articulations to be amplified. In new land, this signal responds to surfaces, histories and trajectories. Each space, after all, contains its own history and its own narratives and echoes, intersecting with those played over and/or within its surfaces. In this sense, reverberation is a relational way of understanding sound circulating between spaces – psychological, geological, animal and human. Sound is communicative and circular speaking at once of origins but and place of reception. Moreover, the human body not only receives sound frequencies with the ears, sounds are perceptible in the case of bass frequencies through the body. 

In addition, as writer on sound Brandon LaBelle explains, the act of listening is relational. In other words sound relies on context and creates space out of the conditions and spatial contours from which it is heard or felt (such as the chest and the resonance of the oral cavity), that is: the spatially-situated body/bodily subjectivity of the listener.Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise, Second Edition : Perspectives on Sound Art (New York, UNITED STATES: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2015). 105 And further to this sound shifts the relationship of the art experience from one that focuses on one artifact to be examined, rather, it creates the space of experience.  LaBelle writes:

The word reverberation can also be used to mean ongoing consequences, ongoing affects or effects. Used in this way it connotes responsibility and alludes to agency.

The above definition of reverberation aptly introduces the practicalities of working the multiplicities of spaces that are haunted by coloniality such as cultural artistic institutions. However, quite often, institutional spaces focus on superficial acts of cultural representation that this project seeks to challenge. These difficult instance where the artist encounters unchallenged colonial tendencies within the institution, are infused with living politics not unlike the political meeting discussed at the beginning of this chapter. For artists who engage with complex cultural subject matter away from stereotypes and exotic motifs, navigating institutional spaces becomes a difficult process. The default tendency in these settings is to reduce a work to the identity of the artist rather than the content of the work. Representation which relies on colonial models of difference are harmful to the communities institutions claim to represent.

In one particular instance, which occurred within the span of this research project, I was able to test my experiments with showing works that spoke about the layered experience, that worked with ideas around the echo, diffraction and the diaspora. However regardless of my explanations of the work to curatorial staff, the insistence for concentrating on the otherness of my identity, and its potential presence in the work, became an obstacle for the display and engagement with the ideas within the work. The works were a set of sculptures which contained sound within them, each playing a different element of a composition. The composition comprised of field recordings of the surrounding the area of the gallery.  It became clear that what was to be important for the institution in which the work shown was to concentrate on my identity alone. No reference was made to the sound element of the sound work. As a result of this need to flatten the work it became clear that the complex ideas within it, those pertaining to my engagement via sound with the surroundings of the institution as well as more narrative sound compositions became secondary to the expectations of a narrative of performative difference that was overlayed in lieu of it being evidently present within the work. This imposed flattening was perceived to be more palatable to the general public. I became more aware of my position as a token and I had to negotiate through my own feelings of ungratefulness for being given this opportunity. 

The walls of spaces which house art are surfaces which represent certain histories – much in the way the walls that cause the refraction of the echo. What one learns from reductive experiences is that there is great difficulty in the reception and framing of works which operate on from the point of view of problematising identity or  difficult music as Dylan Robinson describes it discussed in the first chapter. Much like in the feminist meetings where nuance and multiplicity are outside of the experience of those making decisions, prejudiced assumptions around public reception are overlayed by the art institution, funding bodies, and stereotypes.

Regardless of how visually or sonically cohesive a work might be, there is a limited scope for language to describe a layered experience. And limited scope to attempt to advocate for the legibility of this experience that is often perceived as threatening and actively promoting the disruption of an already practiced scripted experience of identity. Thus, to acknowledge art as the construction of a space of multiplicity and to conjure multiple timelines, whether perceived or opaque becomes a political act. 

These tense experiences within the institution teach artists that it is important to have agency over how one’s work is to be framed within exhibitions, prior to any involvement with an institution. Further to this, it is important that an artist maintains and articulates a strong sense of control of the framing of the work at all as well as control as to how the artist themselves will be presented. These experiences of misrepresentation or mis-framing are reminders that one of the drivers for the events and the construction of the soundsystem that have formed part of this research has been precisely to set up the conditions for agency, autonomy and experimentation to take place amongst diasporic subjects as well as First Nations peoples. These are spaces for relationality and intersubjectivity to take place without a need for translation. It gives hope that there are other similar spaces being organised in Naarm, Melbourne as I type these words and that there are curators and artists whose main intention is to challenge the notion that representation is enough.

The presupposition that the artistic institution will only be attended by audiences that are a part of a monocultural monolith is a problem which is hard to surmount as long as the only way the art of non-white artists is presented as token or is there to represent difference alone. In reality, the public is complex and perhaps without activism and challenging conversations and structures existing to challenge  these conditions there will continue to be omissions and the flattening of experiences.

The role of sound in understanding place surfaced as an interest in the later stage of this project. I wanted to understand how sound could be employed to discuss the settlement of a diasporic subject on the unceded First Nations land that I inhabit, and this concern came to the fore when I was commissioned to create a work for the exhibition Fluidity (2020) at Incinerator Gallery. The exhibition had water as a curatorial premise. The work I created needed to be made in a way that would adapt to an online exhibition if the gallery were to shut down due to Covid-19. This did indeed take place and strict stage four Covid-19 restrictions went into effect in Naarm Melbourne during the exhibition.Nicholas McElroy, “Melbourne has a coronavirus curfew, stage 4 restrictions and a 5km travel radius. What can and can’t I do?,” ABC News, August 3, 2020, accessed 11 February 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-03/stage-4-restrictions-curfew-melbourne-what-you-can-and-cant-do/12517796, The lockdown was to last many months and resulted in galleries being closed for indefinite amounts of time resulting in programming by art institutions transferring online. I was commissioned for sound art pieces and DJ mixes as they lend themselves to digital formats as they are easy to upload and present. The gallery which had commissioned this new work is close to the Maribyrnong River. The area now known as the City of Maribyrnong was a significant meeting place for the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong peoples and clans of the Kulin Nation.“Aboriginal Maribyrnong,” Maribyrnong City Council, accessed December 8, 2020, https://www.maribyrnong.vic.gov.au/Discover-Maribyrnong/Our-history-and-heritage/Aboriginal-Maribyrnong. Maribyrnong is an anglicised version of the Aboriginal term ‘Mirring-gnay-bir-nong’, which translates as ‘I can hear a ringtail possum’. For the commission I wanted to learn about the history of the river. First Nations writer Tony Birch describes his relationship to researching place via a walking-led methodology: “narrative has always been performed in place; it doesn’t matter where you go, places are not passive.”“ACCA Book Club with Tony Birch in conversation with Max Delaney,” ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, July 29, 2020, accessed December 20, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/acca_melbourne/acca-book-club-with-tony-birch-in-conversation-with-max-delany.

It was important to me to work with careful consideration of the life of the river, available to me through experience and my own observations as well as researching its many histories from the sources available to me. It was important to me to understand the life of the body of water so my research took the form of walks along the river. In this walks I listened actively, and experiencing the river and its surroundings and taking notes through field recordings. I had limited time to spend in the area and wanted to make a new piece which would highlight the layered history of the river which could be accessed and communicated via sound. I realised that during this time of lockdown restrictions when Victorians had a one hour a day maximum exercise time limit I had a boundary of time by which to walk along the contours of the river and pay close attention to its sounds, much in the way in which the river’s name suggests: careful listening. The resulting artwork (sound below) specifically engages with the act of walking and observing.

The completed work is a fifteen-minute sound piece which comprises excerpts from historical radio reportage of the periodic swelling and flooding of the river and the resulting destruction of surrounding colonial settlements. I added my voice by reciting the names of each of the numerous introduced invasive species found by the banks of the river. These plants have taken the space of Indigenous plants and as a result changed the environmental conditions of the surrounds. I spoke their names in a rhythm as I walk among them, simultaneously recording background sounds of birds and other goings on around the river. In this work, I specifically focused on ways to incorporate sound that worked towards articulating the idea of understanding history and its impact on an environment. In addition, I wanted to capture the consequences of the river overflowing and the damage it has caused to colonial settlements along its banks. In this work, I focused on incorporating sound which articulated the idea of understanding history and its impact on an environment. To this end I collected found radio recordings as well as field recordings. The different sound qualities of each of the  segments that composed the final piece worked as a type of sonic strata describing a history of the Maribynong River.

This sound work marked a confident new working method for this project, producing a work adjusted to new limitations and conditions under which it could be experienced.

https://offsite.westspace.org.au/work/call/ Call, Lucreccia Quintanilla, 2020

As the lockdown continued in Naarm Melbourne, I continued to make more sound works. I took the opportunity to experiment and combine DJing techniques and collaging approaches to sound making. The work Call (2020) (sound above) combined turntable blending skills used usually for the DJing of dance music with a more poetic and experimental aesthetic that lends itself to a more intimate listening space and a more experimental artistic environment. Call was commissioned by West Space in Naarm Melbourne for its project West Space Offsite. The work was developed while considering the stillness resulting from the lockdown in public areas usually heavily populated by humans. This stillness made it easier to notice non-human life, specifically birds and their sounds. I had for some time been collecting tracks featuring sampled bird sounds, usually towards the beginning of the song. I decided to create a DJ’d mix utilising only these moments in the songs. The result was an eleven-and-a-half-minute sound work featuring various recordings of bird sounds usually found in the first few minutes of a song. The styles of music in which I found these sounds were varied, including Latin music, dancehall, house music and jazz, and I also incorporated those bird sounds captured in field recordings from areas surrounding my home, recordings made during my daily one-hour walks. The work responded to the conditions of the moment in that it encouraged the listener to pay attention to elements—in songs—which are usually used as atmospheric introductions, as sound links into the actual rhythmic arch of a song, where the beat or vocals commence. These transitory aspects of songs, while setting an atmosphere, don’t usually last longer than ten seconds.

The bird sounds are not featured in isolation—they have usually been laid over the beginnings of a rhythm as it builds up into a song. Which is to say, each of these segments is not only making reference to the natural surroundings of those who produced the songs to begin with, but they also have a musicality to them. As I pieced each segment together according to the background rhythms into a track, I was not only encouraging the listener to experience these moments, but also to listen carefully at this time of pause or transition in their own lives during what was a very stressful time. The finished piece is a reflection of a more intimate form of DJing as a technique for constructing a mood or, as it is described in soundsystem culture, a vibe. Afterall, DJing is a relational medium, one that responds to the energy of a collective presence just as the collective responds to the DJ’s music; it is a reciprocal engagement. However, in this case there was no audience, as there was no possibility for public gatherings to take place during lockdown. Every time I DJ I select music with the intention that I will create a narrative. As I move from one track to the next, I make connections, a type of essay to dance to - that shares my own sound history with the collective. I make connections from one track to the next as I move from that which is familiar to my background to that which shares a similar beat arrangement but comes from elsewhere –a type of collective discursive energy around a cultural agency that is shared.

In the work Call, however, I wanted to speak of agency in a different way. I wanted to work with sounds that were becoming familiar to all of us. As things became quiet in our urban soundscapes, birds seemed to be ‘business as usual’ outside our homes while we remained in lockdown. Accordingly, the track itself presents a soundscape through the sound of a variety of birds. A narrative is added to the track in the way of less musical yet rhythmical motion as the sound of my walking and the birds around my house begin to ground the piece in my locality.

After a summer of bushfires destroyed a great deal of forests and animal habitats in Australia, it became a relevant and pertinent way to approach listening carefully and examining and responding to human relationships to place. This work was greatly influenced by the circular communication, initiated by human clapping, in the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kukulkan. I interpreted the motivation to sample birds in the songs as being akin to the honouring of the quetzal by reproducing its chirp through the echo.

In sampling the work of many others, Call made reference to  human relationships and responsibilities to non-human life. At a time when a designated one hour a day outside came to be perceived as a psychological salve it was more pertinent than ever to acknowledge that perhaps things are not that separate from each other. Sound artist, geologist and theorist, A M Kanngieser articulates this separation between nature and human beings as a Western colonial concept:

In making Call, I wanted to touch on the presence of a potential for intersubjectivity through the medium of sound. I imagined the collective—engaging with this sound work through the intimacy of headphones—and an acknowledgement and a momentary bypassing the boundaries that have created delineated categories, one of which has come to be known as nature.

In the feminist meeting described at the beginning of this chapter, difference was conceived as a way to identify oneself from others through using visual markers connoting lifestyle choice. This is, of course, a big gain since the 1970s Western women’s movement. I use the anecdote as an introduction in order to scaffold the chapter because sound within this project is not only a material consideration but also a conscious approach and an argument for complexity. This anecdote also introduces my early experiences with addressing autonomy and self-determination within a context where difference in culture, class and race are perceived as superficial markers.

My experience with the politics presented in that feminist meeting opened up flood gates to thinking through slippery and complex approaches to counteract an experience that, at the time and under the guise of inclusion, allowed itself to exclude through othering. While sound as a medium lends itself to constructing these layered spaces, the artistic space also presents working situations which perpetuate colonial modalities.

Reverberation and resonance and looping act as techniques and concepts to speak to the way narratives and mythology are able to work within an aurally focused artistic project. They are useful terms to describe sound as metaphor, just like the term echo facilitates an understanding of continuation within the scope of a new location and all its temporalities, giving voice to the aural that is always engaging with its surrounds, and maintaining communication with narratives which inevitably shape the diasporic subject and become part of the strong contributions they can offer their surroundings.

As a child, myths were told to me at night by my grandmother or aunt and usually, as war would have it, by the light of either a candle or turpentine, adding by chance to the darkness in the myths. There was no formality to it, but it was something that happened when we could not turn on the television. Each person I have heard various myths from has a different version of the same myth, adding this detail or that for effect, and highlighting aspects of interest to them. The act of repetition allows for these differences to take place. In this act of repetition, variety propagates.

For Glissant, orality works in a particular way and he explains it with reference to the work of poet Saint-John Perse:

In this passage, Glissant speaks poetically of the ever-developing nature of the oral, the myth—and as in the case of this research, the aural also takes on the qualities of spoken narrative. Through sounds, narratives continue to be told and reshaped. These sounds interact as Glissant describes, with these new places and those after us. These are very often dissonant narratives in their complexity. These are auralities which must be uttered.

This doctoral research began with an enquiry into the potential the echo as an artistic device through which to engage with complexity and ancestral knowledges. Through anecdotes, I grounded this work in everyday lived experience as an observational catalyst for creating artworks. The project has worked towards developing approaches for the transcultural and the intersubjective that are adaptable, rather than condemning them to exist in a perpetual reactive false binary between assimilation and reductivism which are in reality part of the same colonial quandry.

At the outset, this research identified a need for finding an artistic language to engage with knowledges other than Western, yet still within the Western artistic context in which I work. It sought to do this by focussing on agency with a sense of complexity and regard for tensions, also keeping in mind the limitations of art institution understandings of difference and a deep consideration for respecting First Nations’ sovereignty and ways of knowing.

The irreducible nature of a layered and yet common migratory experience is part of this project. However, this occurs not by way of dissection but one of acceptance and recognition. It has been imperative for me to work outside of reductive notions of authenticity or composite identities, which I see as being intertwined with romanticised colonial representations. Which is to say that in the diaspora, narratives continue to be articulated via the oral and aural and, despite geographical distance, they keep evolving. They are adaptive rather than static; They pick up layers here and there through encounters and conversations. These are creative practices that exist outside of the binary of the reductive, and despite the violence of assimilation.

As an artist, I began working from a palette familiar to me, expanding a vocabulary and making choices as has been required for the finishing and presentation of creative works. This has been a project about voice from a space of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in response to a larger cultural and political landscape.

My research methodology on the echo has been a relational echoic practice in itself. I approached the project by opening up my practice to contexts and instances where the echo is the central aspect, as well as exploring echoic understandings within various artistic approaches and narratives. This project has looked to the technological aspects of dub music, archaeoacoustics and the visual when imagining re-tracings of knowledges summoned within and through the echo.

In this project, I have examined the echo through various approaches ranging from intimate, smaller sculptural works to short sound works and discursive sound lectures to larger curated, collective events centred around the soundsystem, through DJing and writing, and through various forms of collaboration. As Covid-19 set in, the work took a turn to more sound collage-based works using the echo as a methodological device. I also established formal and material concerns, working and contextualised this research by examining works from different timelines and various disciplines. Having this multi-discipline approach to research has granted me the confidence to approach my creative work with agency. 

I have used Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant’s theorisation of opacity as a way to introduce the echo as a sonic device of irreducible multiplicity, in the knowledge that this research would be conducted with the understanding of an irreducible multiplicity: that difference cannot and does not need to be reduced to a single identifiable and easily-categorised representation. Subsequent discussion in this text looks to the practicalities

I proceeded to discuss the mechanics of dub music and, through the machinery required,  to create the echo as well as the metaphors for diaspora that are embedded in the genre from writers who have been influential to the development of this project. Thinking of the echo and diffraction, I came across the Mesoamerican architecture at Chinchen Itza pyramid in Yucatán, Mexico which became a crucial part of the research. I began to understand that there were many ways to engage with the echo in my work and that moreover there were other many potential functionalities in the conjuring of the echo.

Diffraction and intersubjectivity are the two main themes woven throughout this research. The implications of these thematics became formative in the development of event, sound collage and DJ works, as well as in sculptural studio work. 

This project developed a thesis around the term diffraction after I became interested in the way in functioned in archeoaccoustics. The echo effect through, the bouncing of a signal onto surfaces, walls, stone or the stairs of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kukulkan, for example. Diffraction became a key concept to understanding how my practice developed into diffractory and heterogenous splinters rather than a singular and discrete practice. Diffraction became a key concept as it also engaged with difference and cultural lineage in a way that grounded the project in the certainty that, just as Glissant’s relation, is contingent on the conditions in which it arrives and sounds. The conversations that needed to take place for the Cane/Flute object to sound in its new contexts behaved in the way of a diffraction. Diffraction also defines timelines within this project as cyclical – that is narratives that bounce and returns and one that does not make binary distinctions between one entity or the other.

Relationality and intersubjectivity have played another crucial role in the development of key works in this project, and this dynamic is specifically evident in Cane/Flute, a work sparked from a relational encounter in the form of ‘passing down’. By continuing a trajectory of the relational, the passing down became the passing along of an object, the flute/cane thus built a narrative based on aggregating and subtracting. In this way, this object created its own echoic actions through sculptural, compositional and social interactions with the artifact as instrument.

From the object to structures of support and ritual, this form of echoic communication is transferrable to a conceptualisation of  soundsystem events as setting up the conditions for a complex form of agency to take place. Perhaps the most radical aspect of this project has been experimentation with the relational within my artistic diasporic context that I writing within, in which I was able to imagine the individual in relation to the collective—a collective of its surroundings, of trees, birds, sky and ground, of ancestors and timelines. This autonomous space is crucial to a sense of belonging and that builds communities which understand similarities and differences, and acknowledge conflicts.

Writing about artist Brian Fuata’s work extended my reference to relationality while engaging in the act itself. Through Fuata’s work, I was able to speak to opacity as a complex space. I situated Fuata’s practice in the in-between space, the relational space of the va . This relational space is the best approach through which to examine the Cane/Flute work and its context. One discussion moves to the next and then the next, in this way that the work developed and grew. Once the cane became functional, that is when it began to sound. Assimilation would have me bury the cane never to see again, and to mourn it unnecessarily. I nearly did.

For the questions raised by the Cane/Flute to be a resolved work to be resolved , this work needed conversation and collaboration—it needed, to be a generative, relational. The outcome form the creative part of this project, such as sound collaborations with Bryan Phillips and Rachel Shearer. This work presents a way forward for future works. I contextualised Cane/Flute within the practice of passing down of materials that acknowledges provenance but which are also dynamic in its interactions, dissemination and presentation and, like the soundsystem, infinite in their adaptivity. This passing from one collaborator to the other  is then contextualised within the importance of repetition as the intersubjective act of making and carrying a narrative. Accordingly, the understanding and constructing of narratives for this project is best done alongside others.

I explored the echo within the conch  in A Steady Backbeat as a more intimate way to engage with orality and aurality, finding a vessel that could both contain and amplify the echo through the sculptural and spatial. This work is important because it begins to engage with the echo as a functional space. The echo that can be heard inside the conches in their contemplative intimacy also provides a very rich connection with mythology and the sound imaginary.

Mythology as a narrative force, was considered to test out ideas around the oral stories available to me. These stories are also found in sound, such as the example I present in the anecdote of the lullaby I sang to my son and which was so vivid in my mind. It became important to actually examine how such information and cultural material can be dealt with in a new context, where this cultural material continues to hold relevance. Moreover, researching the myth of La Llorona provided a way to articulate a feminist standpoint that resonated for me, a further diffraction of my work within new spaces and places while also working with the narratives that I construct within the Naarm Melbourne landscape of Indigenous and settler interactions. I have aimed to learn and listen within the settler context.

This creative project contributes to scholarship on the echo from an artistic standpoint. In turn this project contributes to artistic conversations through the opening of the definition of the echo and how it can operate within the multi-disciplinary context. This research and the concomitant creative works push the possibilities of the echo into the visual and the sculptural. Further to this, I add to research on the potential of the echo as a narrative device in the cultural production of the Central American diaspora within the sonic field.

This project has researched the echo within the field of archaeoacoustics, examining its importance as a sensorial and communicative device operating outside of the Western human/nature binary. The Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl Kukulkan proved to be a very good example of ways to engage with sound as participating in circular forms of time and the relationality of things in space. This circular echoic ‘interaction’ of the echo may be expanded upon in future iterations of creative works resultant from this research. This project positions itself theoretically and artistically within a specific lineage of sound philosophy and sound practice and in this way challenges within the Western academic context the possibilities of what the aural can be and has been all along.

This research’s contribution is but one approach towards a larger discussion. It is not the responsibility or indeed the wish of every artist who belongs to a marginal community to engage with all the layers and multiplicities that make them or their community, but it is imperative that there is space for artists, audiences and institutions to have the capacity to talk about this complexity and to challenge the tokenistic presentation and representation based on difference alone. Perhaps, the only universal after all is multiplicity. 

This has been a very generative project for my practice as an artist and writer and it has taught me that the process of creating agency for one’s creative output inevitably involves working with others. With this knowledge, I aim to create works that reflect this collaborative approach, as well as to create spaces that facilitate diffractions and intersubjectivities.

Continuing on from this project, I have been invited to participate in another for the Makeshift Publics program as part of Arts House, a City of Melbourne performance space.https://www.artshouse.com.au/makeshift-publics/ This is a year-long project that aims to reimagine the public sphere post Covid-19, and will involve a way of working that is analogous to the relational approach of this project. I look forward to the working process as well as its outcomes. In the immediate future, I am collaborating with other artists towards the completion of sound works, and I aim to further develop the diffraction approach in the many sides to my own creative works. I will also continue to develop event-based works and to engage in adaptable way of working with various communities. I will continue to expand on my written work, refine my sculpture technique, and developing pieces conducive to the amplification of sound compositions.

This research has pushed my DJ practice to become more experimental, which is a development that I will continue to pursue. DJing presents a range of artistic possibilities, through the techniques of looping and of repetition as well as the more sensorial platform of the event– just as each bar in a loop repeats in a steady back beat and continues to create a new track, blending into the next, to reflect new ways of understanding.

I have worked with the technique of looping in DJing as well as reverberation, diffraction in the echo and I have defined them as critical within the practical world of the artist and the political subject.

To perceive the echo as propagating rather than decaying is akin to tracing and redrawing, re-rendering and reconfiguring, adding to and subtracting from lineages. My contribution to this field of research is based on my observations and lived experience. It is important for me as an academic that this work be added to by those in upcoming generations— as urgently-needed changes occur slowly within this field– just as much as it is important that this knowledge be useful. It is my hope that this work can contribute to the creation of the difficult sounds of others. It is also my hope that this research can aid in the development of an understanding of how the cultural work of those accustomed to being othered and catalogued can be exhibited for audiences within institutional contexts in ways which reflect agency and voice without a need for reductive translations.

This research has been a very enriching process, during which a lot of work has been produced through much experimentation and consultation with peers and mentors. This work is for those who have to negotiate their agency in various contexts. This research and its outcomes are a reflection of more than fifteen years living and working as part of the Naarm – Melbourne artistic landscape. This research is a homage to my peers,  those who have come before me— thinkers, artists and most importantly my ancestors, in all their complexity.

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