2021 / sound collage
Pulse (2021) is inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s work Dub: Finding Ceremony and Leny Mendoza Strobel’s anthology Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous. This work combines voice narration (recitation of poetry), sound effects, and field recordings. My words are responding to and in conversation with the poetry from Gumbs’s prompts “When you think it’s time to come up for air, go deeper. When you think your heart will break, stay there, stay with it. But at the same time, when you think you gotta hold onto something (like who you think you are), let go (xiii).” The intersectional nature of this work seeks to show the parallels between Gumbs and Strobel’s ideas and their influence on my interpretation of ritual, ceremony, and ancestral knowledge.
Pulse, originally titled Remembering the Pulse, was featured in the annual international festival Rewire 2021 (Hague, The Netherlands). Please see the excerpt below for the list of selected artists chosen from the Open Call for Sound and Radio Works.
This year, Rewire has broken away from its traditional festival format, and with it, the discourse programme’s Open Call – which usually asks for creative texts and essays – has also adapted. For our May 2021 edition, Rewire sought soundscapes, spoken word pieces, radio experiments, found sound, innovative approaches to drama and documentary, and radical and challenging new programme ideas. With over 400 excellent submissions it was a very difficult task, but below you can find the final selection:
Dominic Jaeckle & Nadia de Vries – Verse & Chorus
BLACK TO COMM – MM∞XX
Jake Muir – Cloister
Magz Hall – Waves of Resistance
Anna Friz & Emmanuel Madan – The Joy Channel
Connie Zheng – Soil Trance
Martyna Basta – Trace
Viv Corringham – Shadow-walks
Dorothy Santos – Remembering The Pulse
Francis Sosta – RITUAL /POLITICAL #2 interview w/ Franco ‘Bifo ‘Berardi’
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 