Practices of Care and Sites of Resistance in Contemporary Multimedia Multisensory Art

Abstract

 In the latest edition of Feminist Media Histories, the editors observe how the recent conceptual troubling of care has enabled possibilities for work in feminist media histories to reconsider both our contemporary moment of mediated care and earlier enactments of care by communities through media (Banner & Zeavin 2023). In imagining safe, inclusive, and interdependent spaces, artists working at the fulcrum of various media and social worlds have much to contribute, since maintaining a practice in neoliberal contexts means forging alternative ethics while nurturing sensitivities, relationalities, and resourcefulness (Millner & Coombs 2021). Using a multi-media multi-sensory artwork at the 59th Venice Biennale as a case study, this paper examines the relationship between sound, listening, and social practice art as affective modes of care praxis, where their intersection is a critical method for creating new formations of resistance, possibility, and community. Emerging from Sonia Boyce’s Devotional Collection (1999-ongoing) – a living archive that evidences the cultural contribution of Black British female musicians to international culture – Feeling Her Way (2022) brings together a series of shifting and evolving audio and video channels featuring five Black female musicians as they improvise, collaborate, and play with their voices. Boyce is the first Black female artist to represent the United Kingdom in Venice and was awarded the top prize at last year’s event. Grounded in notions of social interaction, freedom of expression, and improvisation, this immersive artwork amplifies the collective dynamism of the musicians brought together by Boyce yet does not rely on unity or synchronicity. Instead, the spirited and diverse interpretations of various prompts along with the range of performer’s capabilities create dense, layered, and intricate fields of sound, forming a deliberately multisensory sonic-social collage rooted in the physical, material space of the recording site, Abbey Road Studios, remediated within the U.K. pavilion. On multiple screens, viewers watch these singers vocalize shrills, screams, murmurs, and humming, together with melodies and chants throughout several open rooms accompanied by gold embellishments and vibrant patchwork wallpaper. Through artistic practice, Boyce embodies an ethics of care based on responsibility, collaboration, attentiveness, and attunement to the musicians she works with, in the practice of collecting, archiving, and displaying precarious materials, and in what she invites the audience to participate in through listening, walking, and moving through the space. This paper argues that by centring the embodied voices and embeddedness of Black female musicians and allowing the audience to bear witness through the visualization of their interaction, Boyce participates in the complex process of rewriting, rereading, and re-sounding history. Boyce’s approach to the issues of neglected and disregarded histories through sound, socially engaged arts, and relationality demonstrates how these modes contribute to practices and discourses of care, resistance, embodiment, and community. Examining mediations of care for and by minoritized and racialized subjects helps reshape historical knowledge of media and our understanding of mediation as a strategy of resistance and care that crucially overlap within the collective networks that they seek to foster.