exploring the role of sound and listening in natural and cultural environments
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Summer Soundwalk Series: JeeYeun Lee
June 22 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Join us at Steelworkers Park for a sound walk led by JeeYeun Lee, entitled, “Shore Land”. We will meet at the end of the driveway into the park next to the statue “Tribute to the Past” by Roman Villareal.
RSVP here: https://forms.gle/4yCv1tMwWDkDxjL69
From the first years of white settlement in Chicago, the shore of Lake Michigan has been heavily engineered. Legislation, lawsuits, planning, and construction have created today’s lakefront, with more than 5.5 square miles of lakefill stretching across 30 miles of shoreline between Evanston and Indiana. Much of this land is public access green space inspired by Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. Often described as visionary, the plan was also designed to reduce labor conflict by providing recreational outlets for the working class.
Yet this lakefront can also be viewed as unceded Native territory. As the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi insisted in a 1914 lawsuit against the City of Chicago, this “made land” extends beyond the boundaries set by treaties: the Lake Michigan shoreline at the time that the treaties were signed. SHORE LAND is a suite of audio narratives that explore these contradictions, contrasting modes of settler engineering with Indigenous perspectives on the sovereignty of land and water. Join us to listen, walk, and discuss. Please bring smartphone and headphones/earbuds so you can stream and listen to the audio as we walk.
More information about the project can be found at:
https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/
JeeYeun Lee (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses walking as a way to witness histories and structures of oppression and resistance in urban places. As a person from a formerly colonized country, Korea, she is committed to understanding and working against the position of now occupying Native land.
In partnership with Night Out In The Parks and the Chicago Park District, the MSAE Summer Soundwalk Series program consists of a series of guided soundwalks, workshops and training sessions that engage multi-generational communities in their own neighborhoods. Participants will listen to and for cultural and natural features of the landscape. Rivers, streets, residential and commercial dwellings, traffic patterns, human and animal sounds all feature in these soundscapes. Are plants tuning in, contributing, or responding to all this sound? How do we listen culturally, collaboratively, and more carefully?