Gregorio Fontén: "Listening alone is not enough"
In this first 'Sound Ideas' post, Chilean artist Gregorio Fontén challenges the primacy of listening in Western sound art practice and asks what it means to also make oneself heard.
Welcome to the occasional series of guest posts on Through Sounds that I’m tentatively calling ‘Sound Ideas’, each of which will put forward a provocative or challenging idea about sound, listening and the environment that bridges academic and non-academic perspectives.
I first met Gregorio Fontén in 2014 in London, on his way to finishing a Sonic Arts PhD at Goldsmiths University and already developing his thinking around what it means to listen and make sound. Ten years on and Fontén is a central part of a small but dynamic sound arts and experimental music scene in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, hosting residencies at his Laboratorio del Eco, producing festivals and collaborating with local/global online radio station Radio Tsonami.
Although rooted in an academic context, Fontén’s work speaks outwards towards themes of identity, the body and listening. He describes this relationship as vacilar, or the oscillation between listening and dancing, through which resonances between the body and its environment are created. Interested in interventions across mediums - whether poetry, song, improvisation, piano works, field recording, installation and visual works - his work is increasingly underpinned by scepticism towards the privileging of listening in Western sound studies, offering instead a theory of making yourself heard, which for Fontén is peculiar to the Latin American experience.
The text Fontén has contributed below first introduces and then shares an extract from “The Motor-Mouth of Vacilar” which is part of the book, Del Vacilar, that Fontén has written (in Spanish) and will be published in Chile in due course. He says the book as an attempt to bring together the different elements of his practice, which he begins by describing as that of the ‘cantautor’ or singing author.
Words: Gregorio Fontén
I could describe my work as that of a singer-songwriter, or better still of a cantautor (which is the Spanish equivalent of singer-songwriter but that would translate in English as “singing author”). I believe all my work in poetry, music, sound art, visual art and academic research springs from developing this cantautor practice. From it I develop an exploration of my my cultural heritage, my personal identity, my physical presence, the influence of social and natural surroundings, and so on.
In song I am a voice singing, a hand strumming a guitar, an amplified sonic presence that influences and is influenced by others. I am present, alive as a sonic configuration that will pass away.
As a cantautor I can feel that sonic experience is not only about listening, but also about making yourself heard. Both are integral parts of sonic experience and none takes precedence over the other.
Listening and making yourself heard are both as relevant and as unavoidable.
I feel that today not only in sound art but sound studies in general there is an emphasis on listening by itself, and listening is proposed as holding a universal value - a liberating practice that will provide the basis for global justice, for empathy towards all sentient and non-sentient beings - as if listening would hold the key to mutual understanding and coexistence between all.
Listening practices are specific mind/body disciplines that cannot embrace the whole of sonic experience. Moreover, as specific mind/body disciplines, listening practices are also a way of articulating sonic experience - that is to say not of listening, but of making yourself heard.
In deep listening and other akin practices throughout the humanities, listening is built on top of a promise of justice, of tolerance, of acceptance. From the cantautor standpoint, listening is dirtier than what it is assumed to be. In this sense the emphasis I’m trying to bring about is about hygiene and justice. A listener uses space and pollutes the sonic realm. Through its discipline, its practice, its presence, it is disturbing the medium, silencing other sonic possibilities. It is not only listening but making itself heard simply by deciding to listen. By taking a listener stance, it is imposing a directionality to the experience that is silencing other possibilities.
There are elements of sonic experience that cannot be properly unfolded through listening. For us in Latin America this is intuitive as we have been forced to listen and we know, through our bodies, that that is not good enough. For example, in the 2019 social uprising in Chile, people screamed, fed up with listening to politicians and being forced into silence. The type of sonic engagement this required was not one of listening but of banging and screaming, it required making yourself heard.
Listening alone is not enough.
In this sense, I prefer understanding sonic experience in terms of echolocation rather than listening by itself, as echolocation requires both that you emit sound and listen. This is what I have developed as a cantautor. From early on I developed this approach by trying to simultaneously “manifest” and contemplate” and from that period I published my first poetry book Contemplacion (Libros de La Elipse, Santiago, 2001) and the sound poetry/winka rock album Cuchufleta Punk (2004). From that early stage I have developed and explored this cantautor practice, both as an independent artist and also in practice-based research in academia, which I enjoyed but feel disappointed by the fact that sound studies’ academic knowledge transmission cannot be done through sonic engagements but through papers and conferences which only work through visual logic paradigms. So what is the point then?
Currently I live in Valparaíso where I work as an independent artist and continue developing this cantautor practice. For me, it is deeply connected to a Latin American sensitivity of ambiguity between the colonizer and the colonized, a dislocation of cultures that leaves us in sort of a transcolonial vibration. An evanescent, sonic transit I explore as an echolocation that is not confined to acoustics only, through the idea of Vacilar and the Sonic Criollo.
Vacilar is a word that has multiple meanings in Latin American Spanish and from what I gather also in Brazilian Portuguese. It can mean to oscillate, to doubt, to trap, to party. In that sense I believe vacilar is a good way of describing a sonic engagement that is about listening and also making yourself heard. It acknowledges that there are sonic engagements prior to and after listening, just as there is listening prior to and after making yourself heard. Neither takes precedence.
Vacilar as doubting is openness, it is listening. As partying it is participating, expressing yourself. As trapping it is composing/designing the situation in which listening and making yourself heard are conjured. Like a shaman trap that traps you to open the gates of a different reality.
Vacilar is the oscillation between listening and making yourself heard which is opened by a sonic trap. A lot of my work is based on developing those traps.
The traps open what I call the Sonic Criollo, which is not a human being but a person that is sometimes identified with the individual and sometimes with the environment, sometimes it is connections between everything, sometimes it is a Western persona, sometimes it is Pachamama. It oscillates between collectivity and ego, of enforcing yourself and of erasing yourself into something bigger. At the same time it is important to understand it lacks the balance of yin yang. It has no resolution, it doesn’t dissolve into nothingness, it is Latin American in its dirtiness and ambiguity.
As such it is definitely not a theory that can be accessed logically or an intellectual concept that comes before action. It is through feeling, through embodiment that it awakens.
Perhaps this sensitivity is about reconnecting with an embodied intelligence that has to do more with the spiritual than the rational, that is more about feeling and wordless communication than with data extraction, intellectual knowledge and resource exploitation.
The Motor-Mouth of Vacilar
The following is a translated extract from “Habladuria del Vacilar”, a text that was born from an improvisation at the microphone. As I speak I add echoes to certain words to order my thoughts. Then this improvisation was transcribed by a text recognition algorithm and edited to assemble the script.
this sonic sensibility that I propose is a practice of listening, of singing, of conversation and of dance
as much
a thought as an emotion, a language as an illiteracy
this sonic sensibility, this vacilar that I call it, raises an ecological policy
from an American South wavering immersed in disparities that oscillate without ever finding balance
oscillating opposites reveal to be the same thing
oscillating the same triggers differences
oscillating time is space
oscillating one's own is alien
but at the same time
the human system is static
in its calendars, its writing, its knowledge
can balance never be achieved?
there is a grammar
unpronounceable in words
that wavers (vacila)
maybe that's what we called music at some point
music is an unfolding of language:
At once shallower and deeper.