« Nomadic Art » SOMEWHERE INBETWEEN: SESSION #25

'Somewhere inbetween' is a sonic ethnographic journey by the artist and anthropologist Melanie Garland, layered with recordings from the North Sea and South Pacific Ocean, underwater, winds, storms, and walks through the cities of Rome-Italy, Calais-France and Antofagasta-Chile. A multiplicity of tracks with overlapping languages and sound materials emerges in the experience of understanding the sensory plurality of traces between Europe and South America.

For NomadicRadio N. 25, Melanie is interested in bringing her archive of artifacts, soundscapes, interviews, and radio shows found on the internet, which were collected and recorded in her fieldwork(s). Reflecting on the possibility of the Sonority as an approach to political practices of listening through situated knowledge. She is focusing on sonority as memory: stories, place, and emotion, and how this memory could produce collective imaginaries from a decolonial perspective.

Listening guidelines: The Sonority you are listening to right now has English and Spanish audio. The English tracks are program fragments from Jungala radio —a community digital radio located until 2016, inside the refugee camp so-called The Jungle in Calais, France. The recordings, edits, and post-productions made by the camp residents and volunteers, are mainly from the big eviction event that occurred in October 2016. The Spanish track is an online interview with the priest Felipe Berrios, a catholic icon in Chile, as he was the founder of the NGO Techo para Chile —an organization that builds prefabricated housing for marginalized groups in Chile and Latin America. In his interview, Berrios reflects on the current migration in Chile and explains the internal system of one of the largest migrant camps in Chile, where he currently lives. Garland is interested in including this track because the way he reflects and thinks through has a paternalistic and colonialist touch which can be an example of coloniality nowadays. After this interview, Melanie recited a poetic piece in Spanish that reflects on the contradiction of the reality in Antofagasta, the city with the highest income per capita in Chile and the city with the highest number of informal migrant camps.

ARTIST LINK: https://www.melaniegarland.com/SONICS-VIDEOS/SOMEWHERE-INBETWEEN-Sonotory

NOMADIC RADIO LINK: https://www.nomadicart.org/NOMADIC-RADIO-1