Summer Soundwalk Series: Josh Rios

Please join us for “Archive as Crossfader”, a soundwalk led by Josh Rios at Harrison Park. The walk will start in front of the National Museum of Mexican Art.

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/xAw4n4j9ooXvWKv3A

Archive as Crossfader asks participants to engage in a handful of sonic and listening workshops designed to contemplate the sound(s) of community and home, whether that is defined geographically, psychically, in terms of social relations, or as memory. Participants will share short reflections on place, home, and sound, as well as make short field recordings that crossfade between multiple sounds, treating the public audioscape as an archive which can only be documented partially by listeners on the move. The workshop culminates in the playing of an impromptu sonic collage made of our field recordings. The event ends with a short dialog about what we can take away from such an experience and what it means to think about the archive as a crossfader.

Participants will need a phone with voice memo or another similar application that can record sound.

Josh Rios is a founding member of Sonic Insurgency Research Group and a faculty member at the School of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago where he teaches courses in social theory and research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator his projects deal with the histories, presents, and futurities of Latinx and Chicanx subjects and hemispheric resistance to globalization and neoliberalism. Recent projects have been featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME.), Locust Projects (Miami, FL.), Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO.) and the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA.) Recent publications include “What is Justice to the Dead? On Sabra Moore’s Recon­struction Project” for the exhibition catalog, Art for the Future: Artist Call and Central American Solidarities, and “Sonic Legal Spaces: An Essay of Overdubs” for Columbia University’s Academic Commons. Other projects include a series of conversations and autonomous study groups about sound and power sponsored by March: A Journal of Art and Strategy.

In partnership with Night Out In The Parks and the Chicago Park District, our 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?