As part of my creative research and community practice, I am experimenting with sound- and music-based activities as a tool for collective story-telling and potential “Sonic Rebellions“. During a creative research weekend with a group of migrant women activists for my PhD (read more about the project in the Pockets of Togetherness Zine), I have used activities around song-writing, sound-making, looping, musical, poetic, and rhythmic improvisation, as a form of ’embodied’ knowledge-production about the UK’s border(ing) violence.
This soundscape is an edit of the group’s improvisations on a loop station around the collaborators’ stories of bureaucratic violence and institutional racism within the UK’s ‘Hostile Environment’.
The messiness, noisiness, and repetitiveness of the layered loops mirror everyday experiences of slow violence and racist interactions with institutions and authorities. In the recording different voices and actors within the Hostile Environment enter into a dialogue with each other – voices of social workers, Home Office employees, lawyers, charity workers, friends, internal voices, voices of oppression as well as voices of care, encouragement, resilience, and resistance.
Our sound-making together offered a space for participants to connect, layer, and re-assemble their individual experiences within a process of storied knowing. I believe that this transition from an individual to a collective story can be deeply empowering and power-ful because it forms the basis to build solidarity. The soundscape also captures the messiness and complexities of telling a story with several people and voices.
The layering of several stories and voices not only allows for more anonymity of the individual storytellers but importantly resists a potentially violent linearity and chronology present within so many stories on migration (see Alexandra D’Onofrio, 2019. ‘Performing im/mobility: Going beyond the testimony trap’). Working with loops can offer a radical alternative to resist linearity because they are per definition more circular, resisting a clear beginning and end.
Our use of sound helped to take serious concepts of embodiment and storytelling and knowledge-sharing beyond words. It allowed us to work with our bodies and voices not only as sites of violence but also as sites of knowledge and connection. This playful and creative process allowed participants to connect in multi-sensory ways, learn, laugh, cry, move and be moved, to meaningfully engage with shared experiences and build solidarity in doing so.