Abstract for audio paper The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole, in publication with Seismograf Peer.
In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by “rejecting the solidity of a frame” (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged in the in-between of minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity, and “assembly of our obligations to one another” (2021, p. 8.)
Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance takes the shape of a formless formation to explore integrity and wholeness among collectives that self-organize for radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about moral virtue but rather a collective, ontological state of being whole.
Guided by an ethic of emergence (brown 2017) and traditions of Black study (Harney and Moten 2013), we assembled members of three creative collectives for regular strategy, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine month period. These collectives are SOLHOT, Fire in Little Africa, and The Aadizookaan. We asked ourselves the following research question: how do these collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time?
These sessions generated a shared archive of sonic material for the not-yet (van Hesswijk et al. 2021): conversation recordings totaling over 20 hours, ritual scripts we wrote, original sound compositions, and more. From these materials, we composed borderless vignettes where voices and sounds converge, dissolve, pulse, and rupture in loving demand for the wholeness we will only find among one another.
Bibliography
brown, a. m. (2017) Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Brown, R.N., Smith, B.E., Robinson, J.L. and Garner, P.R. (2018) Doing digital wrongly. American Quarterly, 70(3), pp. 395-416.
Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013) The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.
Ruiz, S. and Vourloumis, H. (2021) Formless formation: Vignettes for the end of this world. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.
van Hesswijk, J., Hlavajova, M., and Rakes, R., eds. (2021) Toward the not-yet: Art as public practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Biographies
Emery Petchauer is most at home in intergeneration art, expression, and learning spaces where youth and adults make things together — especially beats, sounds, songs, and lots of noise. He plays the role of curator and conduit in these spaces, linking together the relational and material assets for teaching, learning, and living. A longtime turntablist and newer sound designer, he is a professor in the Department of English and Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.
Ruth Nicole Brown is Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Brown grew up in Park Forest and Chicago Heights, IL nurtured by bold and determined practices of collective possibility. She continues to activate home truths and bring other’s to futures of radical creative power and praxis through Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective Brown founded in 2006 to celebrate Black girlhood by meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart.
In collaboration with Am’re Ford, Mark C. Francis II, Dr. Stevie Johnson, Sacramento Knoxx, Sandy Love, Jessica Robinson, Jacobi Ryan, and Dr. Blair Ebony Smith.