Hidden Sounds-Private and Public, Imaginary, Rescued, and Restored

Cartographies of Sound (2021-2022)

Abstract

A child looks out the window of a moving car. He tries to focus on some point in the landscape that captivates him, something strange, a gesture. Nothing he can see excites him, and he gets angry. The present has lost its interest; it is now a white frieze and there is nothing worth rescuing. The boy is the son of a sound documentary filmmaker who is travelling with his mother to the Sonoran Desert. Upon surveying it, he thinks to himself: “Maybe if we find a new way of documenting the world, we’ll begin to understand this new way of experiencing time and space”.

The cartographies we propose in this work constitute a dogged quest in that direction: a reflection on what and how to document is now urgent. There is a conviction that runs through the entire corpus that is based on the unwavering belief that sound holds its secrets under lock and key. It buries them like a living thing, far from the quotidien, just for the sake of preserving something of value. In each place, there is a sound at the level of the earth, which is that which reaches the ears; but other sounds lie elsewhere. They nest up on high or down below, in the broken or the small, in the remains and the resonances. There is no city that does not have—or does not hide— the forbidden, the marginal, and the dirty, as well as its scandals, its shame and ignominies. They do not appear on Google Maps or in hotel displays. But, there they are. And they make a sound, and they reverberate.

This is what this collection is about.