Huele de Noche: Sound as fugitive meaning

Sound as fugitive meaning

¿de qué sirve el arte?
      … pues nos da dirección

By Carolina Vélez Muñiz, José Juan Solé Gálvez 

“Pero ¿y el huevo? Este es uno de los subterfugios de ellos: 
mientras yo hablaba sobre el huevo, había olvidado el huevo. 
«Hablad, hablad», me instruyeron ellos. 
Y el huevo queda enteramente protegido por tantas palabras. 
Hablad mucho, es una de las instrucciones, 
estoy tan cansada.”

Clarice Lispector, “El huevo y la gallina”

Dos Locos (2021), Vani Aguilar 

Individual notes, frequencies, and tonalities are not perceived separately. It is among the notes and the gaps between them that something emerges. A progression which plays with reminiscence, anticipation, and rearrangement is where meaning is formed. Unquantifiable knowledge is exchanged through vibrations; a type of awareness capable of opening portals between beings and realities.

Relying on tradition to generate meaning leans on a consistency of cultural threads, unbothered, sometimes preserved under desiccated conditions. Cultural heritage is something that roots communities. By establishing basic differences, it provides a sense of belonging which encourages communal work and protection of one’s own. Imbalances in systems of representation end in a static reverence of these differences, instead of co-appreciation. Propulsion and metamorphosis: a weakening of unity. Finding impossible progressions where even the analogous does not merge, or a refusal of total convention, can be a threat to the homogeneity within a community. 

New technologies and exchanges are constantly influencing tradition. For example, how the brighter colors yielded from synthetic dyes have been incorporated by traditional textile makers and industries. Or Pirekuas, traditional P’urhépecha songs, which are distinct from other musical traditions in Mexico. At the same time, like the rest of the country’s music, they morphed with the introduction of Western string instruments and rhythms from Europe and Africa. Like the homogenous diversity of the sound of water falling, these practices are transfiguring at their own pace, yet are deeply intertwined and drizzled through the encasing of popular traditions and their pride.

We reproduce tradition with each movement we make, each sound we resonate in. This fugitive mode is not a model of a realized thing, impervious to the corrosions of time. It is not architecture, it is music. A representation of time and a multiplication of sounds; a creation that goes against a concrete knowledge and therefore is more empathic in the relations between perceiver and perceived. In this back and forth, an indirect direction is provided by rhythmic or constant commands.

Meaning dependent on the consistency of cultural threads, linear and categorizable, organized and decisive, is not useful in the consideration of the arts. Improvisation and experimentation could not be understood in this way. This dependence would shift from the broad and implicit to the narrow and explicit: a summarizing, or a paraphrasing of something that has already been expressed in a language embodied by a unique creature that does not operate literally; one that is found between shades of meaning, and grades of difference. This essence is not found inside drawers of filed meaning in an archival room. To experiment is to rediscover, where the living form of meaning is found. When we improvise, we are shooting new combinations with arrows that were meticulously carved beforehand. All of these combinations come from somewhere. As people existing in many countries, communities, and institutions at the same time, we have histories of knowledge we can decide to draw from and reference. We can play around to reimagine our pasts, aiming for a new path for ourselves. Or at least imagine ways in which we could do so. We grasp successive and indirect commands as we visualize connections held in notes and silences, like reflective lights in a highway that only pop out as you advance. 

Spaces of protest and celebration exist in the sounds emitted while announcing and denouncing. Sanctuaries of joy are particularly necessary to organize the best resistance: caring for each other while we commemorate together. The analogies we pin between things: humor, connotation, and imagery; understanding something in terms of something else. Different combinations emerge as we play around in groups. Being in conversation with one another allows us to experiment with meaning from the community instead of the individual. These are unsteady grounds for an attempt to establish a design of calculable outcomes, but this mode of change is the source of most of our understanding. Bringing these conversational approaches into more goal-driven forms of advancing knowledge can be a subversive practice. 

For the virtual concerts organized during this Fellowship, I have thought to connect with artists that are looking at the past, present, and future and who situate their work in relation to the communities they belong to. Meaning is minced while finding different modes of protest, or through the integration of radical joy, or while looking for ancestrality in our daily life. How does one make space for their [marginal] community in academic and institutional spaces? Bringing together different communities is experimentation on its own. A soft advice in the construction of an Idea. Tones are felt while they build bridges between the abstract and tangible and the individual and communal. This is the formation of a body built by poetic substance. It is created by an inheritance of what’s left within us, and which is difficult to predict, but nevertheless is a non-meaning closer to an absolute. 

The concerts are testament that this practice can be translated into the virtual and that community is found in online spaces. As the progressions of meaning go, each thing occupies a fragment and waits for the next to deploy an image, these associative decisions create a sense of an understanding. To get together and organize for the welcoming of the pleasant or rejection of our destruction opens up dialogues that exist in all kinds of media. There, we reach an exercise of an ungraspable but coexisting sense. It is extracted from the situation, relation, and intercommunication, against stiff associations of a single sense - forming instead a meaning which is repeatable, simple and grotesque in its counterpoint. Being outside peripheries means you ought to shed some layers and travel long distances to be present in centralized platforms.

Once the contexts where these traditions formed are absent, are we building bridges or denying ourselves?

Replies in the form of movement or reflection are received in order to unravel meaning that settles and dissipates like the evening fog between mountains.