Excerpt from proposal for “You are My Wingman”:
Sonic resistance and sonic rebellion are the shared areas of interest we would like to explore at the retreat. Each of us have variously and creatively made explorations into sound, using sound as a way to disrupt conceptions of femininity, racialisation and legacies of colonialism. We are also interested in the practices of solidarity and care. Care and caring for one another we feel is a strategy against the exploitative world in which we live, particularly as women of colour working in academia and the arts, we feel that this retreat would help us reconnect with each other, recalibrate and simply rest/think.
Marlo is a sound, film performance artist whose practice was informed by the US underground noise scene. Shanti works in radio, field recordings, and sound arts and Natalie works in sound arts and sound technologies. While all three of us hold the place of both practitioner and researcher, it is the opportunity to vacillate between both in camaraderie that appeals to us. We would like to use the retreat to deepen our bond and solidarity of working as women of colour in an often highly gendered and racialized world of the arts and the academy. We would like to use this opportunity to interrogate the ways communal restoration informs mutual creative practices and documents friendship and vulnerable communications.
We have worked together before and are part of the Sonic Cyber Feminisms collective, though we have not worked with each other closely before in this sort of close capacity. At our Wysing Arts residency, the larger collective allowed us to find commonality; our Black and Brown bodies nurtured by the sharing of stories and nourishment. Further pulling our experience from the larger group, we aim to explore how in our volatile political climate of heightened insecurities, a creative work can materialise as solidarity.
We would like to further explore how to combine movement and sound by using daily movement practices such as walking meditations and yoga, sounding sessions, and group writing to track our creative work as a group. At the heart of this project is the interconnected ways of being creative and present in a world that demands us to be otherwise.
- Why would be useful to your respective practices right now?
We were drawn to this retreat due to the caring, nurturing nature and atmosphere of the week that we felt would suit our needs and practices at the moment. We view the collaborative process as both art and resistance: resisting the individualising, isolating world in which we live. We also felt that the retreat would represent a form of self care and care for others. Making, thinking and talking about art in a restful, retreating environment, away from the pressures of day to day life would be useful for us to think through the creative and philosophical ideas we have. We are artists, thinkers and activists: racialised and gendered. The additional commitments that we feel to our respective communities means that we have variously suffered from being overworked. The retreat would be an excellent time for us each and collectively to take a step back and reflect on things, create and to practice some creative, sonic self care.