Amanda Gutierrez – “Walking With” an essay on collective feminism
Walking with is a sound clip that will function as an introduction for an Augmented Reality audio walk. This AR project will be presented at the end of the summer in the city of Montreal. It will be supported by the free mobile app Echoes, using sound geolocative technology.
The sound clip is intended to give a brief explanation to users, about the feminist artist and activist involved, the general structure of the walk, and a few recommendations to listen to the piece while walking. This sound clip also works as a teaser in the dissemination of the AR walk, providing with a general framework to future audiences.
The music that you hear in the background was produced by #Vivas and the voices are extracts from the collective interviews.
Thank you so much to the Feminist Media Studio for the technical support in the development of this clip, as well as members of this workshop for their feedback.
Amanda Gutiérrez (b. 1978, Mexico City) Trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater, Gutiérrez uses a range of media such as sound and performance art to investigate the aural culture of everyday life. Gutierrez is actively advocating listening practices while being one of the board of directors of the World Listening Project, formerly working with The Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology, and currently as the scientific comitée of the Red Ecología Acústica México. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student at Concordia University and a research assistant at lab PULSE and Acts of Listening Lab. Gutiérrez has held numerous art residencies at FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. A recipient of a grant from the National System of Art Creators, in Mexico, Gutiérrez recently was the recipient of residencies at the New York Camera Club, Harvestworks, and MISE-EN_PLACE Bushwick.
Subtitles:
[medium pitch female voice]
Walking With, an aural essay about collective feminism
is an Augmented Reality audio walk
featuring the voices of activists and artists
who embrace the collage as a tool of resistance,
exploration, and coalition,
working collectively for freedom, autonomy, and equality.
The sound walk features the voices from three street art collectives:
Collagues Feminicides Paris, Collagues Feminicides & Feministes Montreal,
and #VIVAS, a Latin America-based collective
that produces sound artworks from political marches and protest.
The aural essay will take the form of a sonic collage
inviting audiences to embody the experience
of walking while listening to these interviews.
The soundscapes are produced by #Vivas
and the street interventions by Collage Feministes and Feminicides Montreal.
The audio will bell activated with your walk,
using the cellphone geolocation
to trigger the sounds in the selected routes.
In this walk, you will hear three different languages,
Spanish, English and French.
The path of each interview will be visible in the digital map
with an interviewee description card.
along the route you might find collages placed in the streets,
get closer to them to hear the soundscapes produced by #Vivas.
You can choose to listen to this walk through headphones,
but we recommend to hear this with another person
using your cellphone speakers or bluetooth speakers.
This option will open a collective listening
and to occupy the streets with their voices and soundscapes.
The project uses Augmented Reality,
a medium that allows invisible layers of memory
to be perceived with our cellphones,
as mediators of the unseen narratives in the space.
This project exist in solidarity with women,
transgender, non-binary, and queer individuals
who have been feeling unsafe and have experienced exclusion in the public space.
This soundwalk invites all listeners
to sonically immerse into these feminist initiatives
activating their voices with your own walk.
For more information visit:
https://pedestrianessay.tumblr.com/
Music par #Vivas
Production by Amanda Gutierrez
In collaboration with
Collages Féministes & Féminicides Montréal
Captions:
[A low chorus of voices hums]
[Chorus contintues in the background]
[Distant bangs. Slow and successive, begin]
[The humming chorus becomes ambient electronic music]
[industrial sounds, clattering but musical]
[echoey voices calling out “VIVAS” several times]
[electronic beat plays in a decrescendo, with a musical woosh behind it]
[medium pitch protestor chorus with reverb. A faster electronic beat]
[samples of distant multilingual voices chattering]
[high energy musical beat with a collage of sampled voices yelling out]
[music gives way to an ambient wash of stretched resonant voices]
[they crescendo gradually with glitchy voice samples slowly re-emerging]
[The voices erupt into a glitchy, high-energy music made of electronic beats and sampled protestor voices]
Credits:
[medium-high pitch voice]
This video was made in the context of a two-week workshop for Talking To Each Other, a multimedia project on the topics of access, disability, and collective sound making. The workshop was facilitated by Piper Curtis and Razan AlSalah. The Talking To Each Other project was directed by Simone Lucas with the Access in the Making Lab and The Feminist Media Studio. You can find more information and the full video transcripts at accessinthemaking.ca and feministmediastudio.ca.
TALKING TO EACH OTHER: A COLLECTIVE SOUNDING PROJECT
A multi-media, collaborative research-creation project directed by Simone Lucas, with Access in the Making Lab (AIM) and the Feminist Media Studio (FMS), in partnership with Accessibilize Montreal and Suoni Per Il Popolo. In this project, the FMS, AIM, and our community partners, want to collectively work, tinker and experiment with the frictions and challenges between technologies, access and critical forms of media making.
