Ana M. Ochoa Gautier
Tulane University

“Contemporary Audiovisuality as a Site of Cosmological Inscription”

Wednesday, February 18, 5:30pm
McKinnon D

For the past twenty years or so I have been participating in different curatorial and collaborative research opportunities with indigenous film-makers in South America, mostly northern Colombia. These forms of curation have been based on oral histories, on-line exchanges or in the politics of event organization and have mostly, but not exclusively, taken place with the Wiwa of the Sierra Nevada in northern Colombia. Recent indigenous film production in Latin America has been analyzed mostly as a site of resistance. Yet, despite the fact that sound is crucial to indigenous cultures, seldom has the sound of film, which is still understood primarily as a preeminently visual form, been analyzed as crucial to such productions. Meanwhile, sound art has arisen as a major site of collaboration and artistic production throughout Latin America, frequently associated to political questions of extractivism and climate change. All this has taken place amidst a major change of digital rights in Latin America.  This paper explores how we can think of the concept of sensorial cosmologies (or of cosmology and its relation to the senses) through forms and formats of production that combine the aural, the oral and the visual in times of changing digital technologies. The paper places particular emphasis on the politics of sound design as a site of inscription of contemporary changing notions of the cosmological and the living in the digital realm.

Ana María Ochoa is a professor in the Newcomb Department of Music, the Department of Communication and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her work is on histories of listening and the decolonial, on sound studies and climate change, and on the relationship between the creative industries, the literary and the sonic in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current projects explore the bioacoustics of life and death in colonial histories of the Americas and the relationship between sound, climate change and the colonial. She has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008). She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003) and numerous articles in Spanish and English.  Her book La Vida de los Sonidos is currently in print with Editorial Mimesis in Chile.