Fecha ...
Can we tell a snake from a branch by hearing it glide?
As humans, our knowledge of the world is acquired, we are told, through sight. Our eyes help us decipher whatever surrounds us, therefore, we have developed prosthetic tools to extend their reach: Maps, perspective, photography, satellite visual recognition, and endless other technologies. But such retinal dependency is merely a tale, a Modern, Western one. Throughout human history, countless cultures and people have grasped the world––communicated and communed with it––engaging different senses. If more attuned to our surroundings, could we sense a snake’s presence by hearing its sensuous, undulated movement delicately gliding down the bark of a tree?
This seminar aims to problematize and disaggregate the visual. As such, we will shift the focus from visuality –often accused of being complicit with coloniality and imperialism– and devote ourselves, in exchange, to the entanglements of sound –whether listened or performed– both with visuality and in the creation of the current state of the world.
While a significant amount of the planned activities will be geared towards being wakeful to other senses and capacities –especially the field of hearing, producing, and muffling sound– we will also conduct a historical review guided by leading scholars and art practitioners of the process of inscribing the confusing listenings that took place in the Latin American urban centres into writing. That is, we will study how the oral and the aural –vocalities that seemed out of tune, difficult to classify as either language or song, improper Spanish accents that did not conform to a supposed norm, sounds of indigenous languages for which there were no signs in the Spanish alphabet, an abundance of noises or ‘voices’ coming from natural entities that seemed to overwhelm the senses– found their way into written media such as history and laws throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Heightened by a fruitful setting like Mexico City, which will serve as a case study and a productive scenario, such discussions will set the groundwork for grappling with matters such as the gendered nature of the “lettered” translation; the rift between “nature” and “culture,” signaled by a clear distinction between sound and voice, that translates into what separates the animal from the human; how has the voice become a metonym of political subjectivity; the often over-looked capacity of sound to be the carrier of history; and the dislocating sensual power of the aural –as arresting as the sound and image of a serpent twisting itself to the point of disappearing amid a leafy canopy– to question the founding narratives upon which the current formation of the world is predicated.