Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG) is Josh Rios, Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt. SIRG’s research-based performance and exhibition practice examines normalized associations between criminality and sound, silencing as a form of social control, and voicing as a form of social resistance. SIRG’s group work has been exhibited and featured in M:ST 9 Biennial (Calgary, Canada), Counterpublic 2019 at The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Acoustic Resonance at Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), and Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity (Chicago, IL). Upcoming work includes solo and group exhibitions at Locust Projects (Miami) and The Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles). Writing has been featured in ON Journal’s Rules and The Design Studio for Social Intervention’s Spatial Justice.
Continuing our Conversations on Sound and Power, Sonic Insurgency Research Group interviews Joe Rainey about his recent album Niineta which brings together dynamic powwow performances and experimental distortion.
Sandra de la Loza’s research-based practice investigates the under layers of our present landscape to open portals and envision future worlds through collective memory and political imagination.
Alex E. Chávez’s anthropological and autoethnographic practices address the relation between sound, power, and culture, especially in terms of how Latinx diasporic sonic traditions and experiments move through histories of migration.
A focus on sound, sonic practices, and sounding within the larger framework of Latinx studies necessarily invokes a concern with emplacement, which is necessarily embodied.
Allie Martin uses ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies to consider how gentrification impacts and impedes on Black sonic life.
Cog•nate Collective develops research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region.
Writing through her experience as a founding member of the community arts collective Women on the Rise!, Jillian Hernandez examines how Black and Latinx working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are policed through gendered tropes of deviance and respectability.
Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, JJJJJerome Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation.
Over the next six months, Conversations on Sound and Power will gather exchanges from a wide variety of contemporary artists, scholars, writers, activists, and interdisciplinary practitioners concerned with how sound and ideas about sound shape our historical, experiential, juridical, intersubjective, and current socio-political entanglements.