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.

To recognize that we live on a damaged planet is key to this artistic research, as well as the possibility to reconstitute refuge. This damage is a starting point to understand my own pain, climate grief and loss. As described in Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing et al. (2015) locates humanity in the Anthropocene, as a new geological era where dominant human systems have distorted the balance of the atmosphere, poisoned the Earth’s ecosystems, and as a consequence unleashed the 6th mass extinction and climate catastrophe. In her essay Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, Donna Haraway (2015) refers to the work of Anna Tsing (2015) and reflects on this geological transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene: “Anna Tsing argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity” (Haraway, 2015, p.160). If humans have become a destructive geological force, Donna Haraway (2015) calls for making the Anthropocene as short-lasting as possible and restoring refuge: “to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological– cultural–political–technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses” (Tsing et al., 2017, p.M33). Similar to Wall Kimmerer (2020), Macy and Johnstone (2022), Haraway (2015) underlines the importance of mourning the irreversible losses as a requirement to reconstite refuge. This goes back to Freire (1994), we can only grieve and mourn when we have learned how to name our pain. This is why situating myself in a damaged planet is the first step to embrace my grief and compose songs as an act of restoration. The intention is to transform damage back into refuge, and "commit to life unto life, as the threes fall and take us with them" (Siddiqa, 2022, para.4).

“Been born from so many apocalypses,
what’s one more?
Love is still the only revenge.
It grows each time the earth is set on fire.
But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over
Commit to life unto life,
as the trees fall and take us with them.
I’d follow love into extinction.”

(Siddiqa, 2022, para. 4)

Tip

Tip

3.1 Damaged Planet