Month: April 2022

The Agency To Heal

The key to access the psychotropic forms of being is to reduce that noise we have agency over. By reducing noise, the desaturated environment starts to brighten and we become fascinated by a colourful sentient reality. I’ve found that reducing listening time to recorded music is a way to amplify the music of everyday soundscapes.

We live in a sea. We are soaked in media and images, overlapping symbols and language. We are distracted and cannot focus. Lots of people remain in the sea. Music is often here, an anaesthetic to calm oneself and take oneself inside when the world is a scary place. Living in London requires a gentle anaesthetic to cope with the stimuli. I cannot embrace my fellow neighbours as we march through the tunnels underneath. The city goes deep and blocks the sky with it’s pollution.

How do we reduce noise? Is some noise harmful in it’s materiality? Or is it in the way we approach noise that we harm ourselves? Stoics would say we have free will in how we relate to the world. Perhaps if you bury yourself somewhere deep in the intellect. Some frequencies of sound make the body stressed. Some sounds are too loud. Reducing external noise requires massive changes in the way we live and organise.

The inner world reflects the outer world. The binary of inner/outer is only useful for certain theory and communication. Inner noise often comes from those bodies in pain. Bodies distract themselves from traumas too painful to sit with. We think in words about other places. Is everyone in pain? It seems like pain is unfairly distributed across our species. Some demographics of people experience more harm and danger in the world than others. Some carry more trauma that has been passed over generations. How do we claim presence as a solution, when it’s access is inequal?

Healing occurs in safe spaces. Everyone deserves to heal. Everybody needs someone and deserves protection. Sometimes the safety occurs in a gated community, or absorbed in virtual symbols and images.

I believe healing also occurs outside, and in the reduction of noise we have agency over we begin to learn to be present and comfortable with the environment. The colours begin to lift and in their brightness they heal too. They pull the fascinated body further along a path of recovery.

How do we participate in the collective path of healing? I try to take responsibility of my own pain and to stay present with the world. I reduce those behaviours that numb me when I am able to. Then give attention outwards, and try to accept and support whatever position a friend might be at. To access beauty we must go through pain.

Ugly healing world.

The Right To Record

I am interested in Hannah Kemp-Welch’s project “The Right To Record.”

When applying for the disability benefit ‘PIP’ (personal independence payment), disabled people and those with long term health conditions are forced to go to a private company for assessment and validation of their own disability. They are forced to perform their disability in the presence of an assessor. A disability news network reported that that the assessors ‘lied, ignored written evidence and dishonestly reported the results of physical examinations’.

It is presumed that the assessors want to limit the access to PIP. Is this a prescription from higher forces; a government who performs social welfare for aesthetic purposes, but does not actually care about the wellbeing of citizens? And ideology. Within our systems there exists the stigma on disabled people who are deemed as a burden. It is a common inversion of responsibility; if anyone cares to witness a disabled person and their struggle, they might learn that the disability often arises from external limitations; a society, architecture and bureaucracy constructed for “able”-bodied, “legal” citizens.

My mother has MS and now mostly uses a mobility scooter to navigate Tramore, the small town in Ireland where she lives. The scooter has small wheels and it struggles to cross the many potholes and degraded sidewalks. When she first had the scooter, I was able to finally see the apathy and ableism present in the streets I had walked on for years previously. Her struggle is silent unless she can speak. Disabled people must be listened to.

Hannah started this project to give a voice to those silenced people. This is artist as community worker. How does one facilitate, and work with a community they are also estranged from by education, language and aesthetics? Hannah discusses the tensions of aesthetics between a white educated arts student and a working class community. She said that the art was not the final product, a 30 minute audio file, but instead it was the connection with the group.

Community work is a fascinating alternative to individual art projects; ethically they seem juxtapositioned. One can do both.

Shaking The Habitual Manifesto

The Knife were a Swedish electronic music duo prolific from 2001 to 2013. Their music is thouroughly political; for example, the name of their last show “Post-Colonial Gender Politics Come First, Music Comes Second”. I listened to some of their music and I am glad politics comes first.

In 2013 they released their most recent album, “Shaking The Habitual” along with a flaming hot manifesto. It blurs between hard fact and surrealist poetics.

“Everybody is always desiring already imagined things.”

“Electronics is just one place in the body.”

“We have made some decisions.”

“We choose process over everything else.”

bODY, Unknown. Music as a medium for politics. Imagining possible futures, new ways of thinking, being. Also hard politics with insensitivity to subtlety, as a recipe for jarring music?