Sigaw, ______, (echo)

“Because so much depends upon vacuous speech, and so sometimes it is best to refrain from all human voice; because when we sit with ourselves, there is just air, just light, and this is how we will learn to listen—” writes Barbara Jane Reyes, Bay Area Pinay poet, author, and educator.

In this performance artwork two Pinay artists meet to grapple with the distances of diaspora, language, and medium. They listen through the translations of voice and matter despite the intervals between sigaw/echo. With sound as just air and painting as just light, they come together as an ekphrastic practice to create, to converse, to listen.

FEATURING

Anna B. Gatdula, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of musicology in the Department of Music at UNC Chapel Hill. She performs with voice and music technology.

Venazir Martinez is a Filipino visual anthropreneur, and a street muralist. Her first international solo show HILA-BANA: ESPASYO TEMPORAL will be at the John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, North Carolina on 6 October 2023.

“Desert Specters: Haunting Myths of the Spectacular Bomb in Opera and Film”

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic (2005/2018) are spectacles that produce and reproduce narratives of the United States’ position as a global superpower. These spectacular depictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the genesis of the US nuclear weapons complex hail specific spectators. My work attends to the different media affordances of each form in order to trace the contours of sublimation—how we aestheticize through spectacle and ultimately reify the ideologies structuring the nuclear complex.