Sonic Geographies of Hope: How can Song become an Act of Restoration for a Damaged Planet? by Angela Valenzuela (Loica)

I dedicate this work to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for acts of restoration for our damaged planet. In my project, I choose song composition and performance as a way to find pathways for personal and collective restoration. Through the methods of artistic research I write songs inspired by my experience of ecological grief, academic reading, interviews to song composers, and journaling. As a contribution from my work, I present a new compositional methodology, Sonic Geographies of Hope. This methodology calls for song composers to write songs grounded in personal and collective grief of our damaged planet. I suggest that these type of songs can become an act of restoration and create collective resonance for more hopeful ways of existing and experiencing the world. This methodology is heavily influenced by the work of A. Hazelwood and her methodology Geographies of Hope in Praxis (2020). While I draw inspiration from this methodology, my work focuses mainly on emotional geographies. This work represents a starting point to explore song methodologies that can nurture immaterial geographies leading to concrete, structural ecological restoration. It is an exploration to find ways to restore yourself to continue to fight for the dignity of the places, more-than human life and people we love.

“At bottom, in seeking for the deepest “why” of my pain, I was educating my hope.”
(Freire, 1994, p.22)

As I sit to write about hope, I feel pain for life on Earth and a sense of despair for being trapped in a dystopia or a horrible nightmare. We live in a world made up of international institutions, and governments that have not been able to stop a two-year genocide in Gaza and almost 80-year occupation of Palestinean territory by the apartheid state of Israel. As citizens of the world, we observe International Law and Human Rights mechanisms being transgressed by Israel with impunity, and the support of the United States and allies. The case of Gaza helps us locate ourselves in a world dictated by dominant models of life grounded in patriarchal values, racism, and colonial violence. As Escobar (2018) states in his book Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds: “After more than five hundred years of pa-triarchal Western modernity, this “alchemic civilization” based on “creation through destruction” has seemingly become global, always at war against life” (Escobar, 2018, p.11). This war against life is at the core of my pain. Escobar (2018) goes further to track the source of this destruction: “patriarchy is at the root of all forms of subordination, including racial, colonial, and imperial domi-nation” (Escobar, 2018, p.11). This includes the subordination of the heart. Patriarchy is a system that encourages dissociation and denial of emotions to continue “business as usual,” for us to comply and participate in war against life. This is why, to pay attention to the heart, and to what is causing us pain, is in essence a radical act of restoration. This approach is integral to my artistic research and compositional work.

While centering in my pain, I must educate my hope not to crumble in despair. This is why I turn back to Paulo Freire (1994) in his book Pedagogy of Hope, describing hope as an ontological need. “Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope, as an ontological need, dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. And hopelessness can become tragic despair” (Freire, 1994, p.3). In this work, I will explore the interdependence of environmental grief and hope as interconnected forces for Songs as an act of restoration.

“Poetry is the deep whisper
of the murdered
the murmur of leaves in the fall
the sadness over the boy
who holds on to his tongue
but has lost his soul
Poetry, poetry
is a movement, a dream, the landscape
your eyes and my eyes little girl
heart ears, the same music”
(Chihuailaf, 2020)

Figure 1: Drawing by author

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1.1 Context of the Study: "The why of my pain"