Sounds Like La Union
Archipelagic Workshop and Listening Expedition
Sounds Like La Union, is a sound journey organized by Emerging Islands with sound artist and audio producer King Puentespina, environmental governance professor Celso Jucutan, and convenor for Hiraya Collective for the Blind, Eva Wang
Sounds Like La Union is a workshop on sound gathering, supported by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and developed in partnership with Celso Jucutan and sound artist King Puentespina. The workshop was open to individuals genuinely interested in ecology and storytelling, and participation was free. The goal of the workshop was to listen deeply to the biodiversity, stories, and daily rhythms of our home, in order to produce audio tracks that evoke what it's like to live in La Union.
With the guidance of the Emerging Islands team, nine participants gathered sounds and stories from communities and ecosystems in La Union. King Puentespina then guided participants in editing the sounds together to produce three soundscapes of La Union, which were presented in a community listening event to culminate the program.
Three unique soundscapes containing the many sounds of La Union that represent the culture and beauty of our community were created through the workshop. The ambient listening event at Mebuyan’s Vessel is a feat of collaborative design shaped by local stories. The workshop participants created a total of three tracks, from which King helped refine to create a soundscape unique to each of the three student groups' localities. These tracks, the stories that shaped them, and the story of how they were created from start to finish, are artworks in themselves.
"The first concern of all music in one way or another is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry, our rigidity dissolved when we occur reborn-in a sense hearing for the first time."
-Lucia Dlugoszewski
A zine on deep listening and creating soundscapes
