Sonic Registers
THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S recent exhibition “Project a Black Planet” comprised an exquisite display of some of the most compelling artworks pertaining to the art and culture of Pan-Africa—objects that were also enveloped in, if not amplified by, an aural scenography. The ways that sound, emanating from speakers or depicted on album covers, was interpolated with the visual was indeed one of the exhibition’s most entrancing aspects and radical critical interventions.
“Project a Black Planet”was, in many respects, vivified by its very first foray into sound with the inclusion of Roy Ayers’s song “Red, Black, and Green” in one of the initial galleries. The installation presented the cover of the composer’s eponymous 1973 album plainly framed on a wall, with a two-minute selection of the song issuing from a small wooden speaker box; the arrangement suggests domestic space and, by extension, alluded to the ways in which these sonic artifacts move through the world and inflect others’ lived experience. That inflection is exemplified musically by Ayers’s vibraphone and lyrics, which assume the valence of an anthem. By the time Ayers had released the track, the colors red, black, and green were already circulating across the Black diaspora as a rallying call for Pan-Africanism—beginning at least as early as Marcus Garvey’s declaration that “red represent[s] the noble blood that unites all people of African ancestry, the colour black for the people, green for the rich land of Africa.” Situated adjacent to Chris Ofili’s Union Black, 2003, and David Hammons’s African-American Flag, 1990, Ayers’s composition animated the gallery in a synesthetic way that allowed for, if not compelled, the figurative covering or draping of visitors in the material fabrics of Pan-Africanism, even while it imbued their audio channels with its sonic registers.
Sound was present throughout the show, sometimes in video works that had a conspicuous audio component (e.g., the calm and ironic voice of Ilan Yacine Harris-Babou in her 2018 video Reparation Hardware or the amplified throbbing of a heart in Dawit Petros’s single-channel 2013 Notations for a New Pan-Africanism) and sometimes in tracks that appeared as part of the scenography or exhibition design. In a section titled “Garveyism,” for instance, visitors heard the Garvey’s voice reciting nearly one and a half minutes of the “Great Black Nationalist” speech from 1921. In the recording, the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader extols the possibilities of a large-scale—and separate—global Black community, but the selection tapered off just as he is about to proclaim that this coming community is one that believes “in the God of Ethiopia,” making an acute reference to the cultural politics and long history of Ethiopianism. The recording’s aural scenography set the stage for the section’s visual pieces, including two gelatin silver prints by photographer James Van Der Zee. As visitors heard the fever pitch of Garvey’s speech, they also saw the activist in Van Der Zee’s photo—sitting alongside the anti-colonialists George O. Marke and Kojo Tovalou-Houénou as if a Pan-African state had been realized.
Museums are primarily designed for the viewing of objects; “Project a Black Planet,” meanwhile, caused this framework to crumble, refusing to reduce sound to a mere backdrop or auxiliary to the visual.
The words of the self-identified “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde sonically imbued the “Quilombismo” gallery. In the recording, Lorde reads one of her most famous poems, “A Litany of Survival” (1978), recorded at Amerika Haus Berlin in 1984. Inasmuch as Lorde’s words “we were never meant to survive” function as the poem’s refrain, another cluster of words—“seeking a now that can breed / futures”— gain a different kind of tonal resonance in this context, limning a discursive substrate for any number of Black political projects, from abolitionism in the nineteenth century to Afrofuturism in the twenty-first. Whether inflecting speech or poem—the former delivered to hundreds at a rally during the height of the New Negro Movement, the latter recited before dozens of policy officials and academics in Berlin during the height of the Cold War—the voices of Garvey, who was born in Jamaica, and Lorde, whose mother was Grenadian and father Barbadian, reminded us that the Pan-African project was always animated by Caribbean accents.
The most direct example in the show of artists themselves using sound was arguably Azikiwe Mohammed’s My First Time, 2016–. The installation pairs a classic reel-to-reel player with three sets of vintage speakers that play recordings of a group of interviewees from across different geographies of the Black diaspora as they voice their personal stories of “the first time” they understood that they were Black. The ensuing narratives are revealing and empowering, equally vulnerable and resolute, and, in a word, haunting for the ways in which that moment of recognition is echoed again and again, as something like an auditory hallucination that has become all too real. Mohammed—who eschews the label “artist” in favor of that of a “dude who makes stuff”—makes the “making” part evident through his manipulation of audio equipment. Beginning by disaggregating the paired speakers to form six nonsequential individual channels, Mohammed alters the interface between the digital and analog worlds by presumably recording his initial interviews digitally and then transferring that audio onto magnetic tapes. Next, he plays these tapes on a TEAC X-10R, a vintage tape deck whose particular technological innovations allow for continuous playback—recycling the twelve minutes and four seconds of Mohammed’s interviewees’ words almost endlessly. Extending the sounds of different voices story after story ad infinitum, My First Time suggests that these individual moments of recognition embody a kind of collective trauma that is continually on repeat.
In many respects, these examples underscore not only the question of how the synesthetic registers of Pan-Africanism’s political project mobilize sound but also the problem of how museums conceptualize the relationship between the sonic and the visual. Such institutions are primarily designed for the viewing of objects; “Project a Black Planet,” meanwhile, caused this framework to crumble, refusing to reduce sound to a mere backdrop or auxiliary to the visual. For his 2014 installation Asesinos! Asesinos! (Assassins! Assassins!), Kader Attia took dozens of colorful household doors and split them in half to create hinged A-frames, topping these structures with handheld bullhorns. Installed in this show, the work carried a message that was as blunt as it was resonant: The Pan-Africanist project will always be accompanied by sonic emissions.
Ivy G. Wilson is a cultural critic based in Chicago. He is currently writing a series of essays on The Global Aesthetics of Minor Diasporas.
