Jennifer Allora
2021Returning A Sound
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the U.S Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2003. Allora & Calzadilla became involved in the defense of this cause in 2000 and made a series of works relating to the story of this island. This video demonstrates the beginning of their ongoing interest in the interplay between militarism and sound. In Returning A Sound, Homar, the motorcycle driver and activist, drives around the island as if reclaiming the territory. The muffler was altered so it no longer silenced the noise and became a musical instrument instead, like a trumpet to announce decontamination and recovery in echo to the terrible exploding sounds that had shaped the lives of the Vieques inhabitants for 60 years.
Returning A Sound
The Great Silence
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
The Great Silence focuses on the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe. This site is also home to the last remaining wild population of endangered Puerto Rican parrots, Amazona vittata, who make their habitat in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest. Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script that explores translation as a device to trace and ponder the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors. In the spirit of a fable, the subtitled story presents the bird’s observations on humans’ search for life outside this planet, while using the concept of vocal learning—something that both parrots and humans have in common—as a source of reflection upon acousmatic voices, ventriloquisms, and the vibrations that form the basis of speech and the universe itself.
The Great Silence
The Night We Became People Again
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
This video blurs the boundaries between a prehistoric Taíno creation myth, an abandoned petrochemical plant, a sugar cane plantation, and Puerto Rican novelist and renowned Marxist José Luis González’s short story “La noche que volvimos a ser gente” (The Night We Became People Again).
The Night We Became People Again
Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
A pig is roasted over an open fire, the spit attached to the back wheel of a car. When the car accelerates the pig turns at different speeds, while the voice of Residente Calle 13, a young reggaetón singer from Puerto Rico, addresses the viewer in Spanish. He draws on examples of non-human social organizations, such as those among bats, termites, and ants, for possible alternative modes of being-in-common and describes a possible path for contemporary experience. The world he describes is an antagonistic state of order and disorder, civility and barbarity, in an age of armed globalization.
Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands
The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
This video was shot in a US-owned pharmaceutical plant in Cidra, Puerto Rico. It records the sounds and movements of a “sonic digger,” whose bucket has been replaced by a large cast-iron bell that destroys the interior of the building. The modified machine is thus transformed into a “counter-memorial” instrument that marks the occasion of the closure of this significant workplace, a site associated with progress and health. Through music, it excavates the historical connection between medicine, sickness and cure, and the neocolonial framework of US-Puerto Rico relations embedded in the very fabric of the building.
The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy
Under Discussion
Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla
The Puerto Rican island of Vieques was used by the US Navy for sixty years, leaving its landscape scarred with bomb-craters and its ecosystem severely contaminated. In 2003, a civil disobedience campaign was successful in forcing the military out, and the land has now been designated as a federal wildlife reserve. But this designation entails its own violence, marginalizing the demands of island residents that it be fully decontaminated and turned over to municipal management. This conflict is the point of departure for Under Discussion. An overturned conference table has been retrofitted with an engine and rubber grafted from a small fishing boat. In liberal thought, the table is a common architectural trope used for symmetrical communication and the non-violent resolution of conflict. Yet it often fails to account for the inequalities that structure spaces of negotiation.
Under Discussion
