distance

Queering Spaces Through Sound

A Visual Essay (and work in progress) by Abigail Lindo

São Miguel is the largest of nine islands in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores. It is home to Ponta Delgada, the capital of the region and an area of diverse cultural showcases including music and art festivals, which attract thousands of tourists each year. The temporary community formed by a music festival provides spaces for a distinct ethos, or characteristic culture, that allows participation in the festival to challenge dominant understandings of the spaces events occupy and of the individuals within the performance spaces. This is the reality of Tremor, a boutique music festival that has occurred on São Miguel for nine years, providing alternative uses for renowned venues and the landscape, and providing safe spaces for bodies to exist outside the hegemony of traditional gendered expectations for the region. Beyond this, the festival uses engagement with sound to free traditional performance venues and environmental spaces used for concerts through a postcolonial liberatory practice of queering: transforming the meanings and relationships ascribed to bodies, structures, and cultural practices. In freeing these spaces, the festival provides, acknowledges, and shapes distance through queering: distance from prior understandings/obligations of spaces, from patrons’ other identities outside of the festival, and from expectations in experiencing the self and the space.

Overview of Project

This site, using images to present an ethnographic narrative, reflects one facet of a larger work focused on the sonic culture of São Miguel, the largest island in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores. Ethnomusicological research will be conducted on the island over the course of an eight month period, with special attention to the capital city of Ponta Delgada. I will connect with interlocutors (fellow scholars and professors), locals, and visitors, documenting the impact of musical gatherings as catalysts for the formation of identity and how this occurs differently in the autonomous region, acting as an impetus for cultural connectivity. These gatherings include popular and alternative music festivals, religious gatherings (like the Holy Ghost Festival), educational music classes, and events in locales where music is regularly played and performed.

Considerations for Future Exploration of Fieldwork Images and Video

Living and experiencing the island is translated through the audio clips, videos, and written words aimed at capturing the sensations of existing within the spaces I traversed to understand the meanings within them. Indeed, the image often becomes the thing I study more than the sensations they provoke or sounds I connect to them, and the images themselves do not possess power in their ability to resemble spaces experienced at the time performances took place (Foucault 1982, 8).The moment(s) captured in an image or video is not reproducible and will not occur again or mean what it meant at the time of capture, so how can its value best be mined? By mining, I do not intend to remove a perceived resource from the work for my gain but aim to capture meaningful aspects from the image while the context it provides can still be understood as relevant in relation to the present work. Therefore, mining does not remove value, but aids in acknowledging value through understanding the layers of interaction within the image and through the image and how these interactions signal, representation, and transform the sonic and meanings connected to how we experience sound in the spaces shown.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Bendrups, Dan, and Donna Weston. “Open Air Music Festivals and the Environment: A Framework for Understanding Ecological Engagement.” The World of Music 4, no. 1 (2015): 61-71.

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Bridgewater, Paul. “A Tremor in the Azores: Musical Curiosities On a Distant Island.” The Line of Best Fit, April 13, 2015.

Frank, Alex. “Uncovering a Small, Special Music Scene in the Middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” Dazed Magazine, April 10, 2018.

Hankins, Sarah. “Queer Relationships with Music and an Experimental Hermeneutics for Musical Meaning.” Women in Music 18 (2014): 83-104.

Jarvis, Helen. “Transforming the Sexist City: Non-Sexist Communities of Practice.” Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies 3, no. 17 (2014): 7-27.

McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Close-Up: Black Images Matter: Critical Surveillance Literacy in Social Media: Interrogating Black Death and Dying Online.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 9, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 147-160.

Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.

Silva, Clara. “In March, There is Another Good Excuse to go to The Azores.” Time Out Portugal, February 20, 2018.

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