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.

Here I present insights of Anna Tsing et al. (2017), biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020), and Latin American decolonial thinker Arturo Escobar (2018). Their work has supported my understanding of ecosystemic thinking in a damaged planet.

In the book Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing together with Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (2017) compile a series of articles that situate in the Anthropocene. Their aim is to nurture our curiosity towards the stories told by ruins, ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene to then find ways to limit the destruction of life. Anthropocene as a concept has been widely contested for homogenizing humanity as one, to respond to this, they add that “our use of the term “Anthropocene” does not imagine a homo-geneous human race. We write in dialogue with those who remind readers of unequal relations among humans, industrial ecologies, and human insignificance in the web of life” (Tsing et al, 2017, p.G3). They recognise how inequality, racism and different forms of oppression affects humans differently in our damaged planet.

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020) weaves together her gifts as a storyteller, indigenous woman, and scientist. Throughout the book she generously shares teachings of indigenous wisdom, plants, and more-than-human subjectivities. She offers a pathway to walk together towards the restoration of our relationship with life on Earth. Kimmerer highlights that “one of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with more than the human world. We can do it through gratitude,through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence” (Wall Kimmerer, 2020, p.190). A fundamental part of this practical reverence is to recognize other more-than-human beings as sentient, full of agency and wisdom. Wall Kimmerer (2020) invites us to take an active role in the renewal of the world, grounded in gratitude and respect towards Mother Earth, as well as recognizing our grief and pain in the phase of unbearable loss and destruction: “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again” (Wall Kimmerer, 2020, p.359).

Lastly, Arturo Escobar (2018), in his book Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, explores the concept of ontological design. He argues that “ontological design stems from a seem-ingly simple observation: that in designing tools (objects, structures, policies, expert systems, discourses, even narratives) we are creating ways of being” (Escobar, 2018, p.2). He argues that the current dominant ontological design is an ontology of devastation, where we are “faced with the realities of a world transformed by a changing cli- mate, humans are confronted with the irrefutable need to confront the design disaster that development is” (Escobar, 2018, p.6). His work is relevant when talking about the role of Song as a design tool to transform narratives and create ways of being that challenge dominant western values, and invite other worlds to come.

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2.2 Review of Ecosystemic thinking