Listening as Resistance: Decolonizing Sonic Poetry and the Politics of Sound

This presentation explores how decolonizing listening methodologies can serve as tools of resistance in sonic poetry. By examining the role of sound in reclaiming marginalized voices, this study argues that sonic poetry subverts traditional frameworks that often other non-Western practices. Using case studies such as Rose Cochlan’s Victor Recordings, Edith Sitwell’s Façade, and Amiri Baraka's It’s Nation Time, the research investigates how these works challenge mainstream narratives by embedding cultural and political resistance into sound. This paper will introduce critical listening positionalities as a framework to engage audiences with the layers of race, identity, and cultural reclamation in poetic-musical works, aiming to foster a more inclusive auditory experience. Keywords: decolonizing, listening, resistance, sonic poetry, identity

Melanie Schnidrig (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada) 

The Senses in Resistance: Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain

Multidisciplinary Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 piece Fountain, combines the senses in a striking multisensorial film installation. In the installation, a single-channel video is projected onto a wall of water that cascades within the gallery. This paper explores how the added sensory dimensions offered by the inclusion of water appeal to the gallery visitor and their bodily senses.
Film theorist Laura U. Marks identifies how artists can include representations of the senses in postcolonial film to appeal to the senses as an act of resistance and facilitate a dialogue between the artwork and the audience (Marks, 2000). This paper draws from this argument to analyze how Belmore’s appeal to the tangible and corporeal senses of touch, smell, and hearing in Fountain acts to enhance the impact of the video installation to directly implicate the audience in the artwork’s critical message. Through this exploration, this paper considers the following questions: What advantages does stimulating the bodily senses hold for postcolonial artists? How can the senses communicate alternative ways of knowing? And finally, how can an artist appeal to the senses to enhance a visual medium like film?
Keywords: Multisensorial, Sensory Studies, Sensory Art, Indigenous Artists, Postcolonialism

Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard

Sensing Disability

Disability does not alter or require accommodation of the senses. Rather, the senses of disability are their own complete expressions and powerful creative forces. Recognizing disability in this way changes how we approach access, sensory design, and performance.
Understanding performance as both stage and lens for encountering and examining relationship, Kinetic Light, a disability arts company, seeks equity of experience for its disabled audience members by centering their desires and experiences in the company’s creative practice. Conventional interpretation of dance prioritizes sight, with the result that disabled audiences using other senses have been offered either no access to performance or low-quality, aesthetically inequitable access.
Kinetic Light designs performance in movement, sound, light, image, language, music, and vibration to create multi-sensory performances that can be experienced visually, audibly, and through touch. The content of each form is not identical: each form artistically expresses the work. Audience members are invited to experience the work according to their primary mode of artistic encounter. Research and novel technologies enable this execution.
Kinetic Light’s work addresses societal injustices encountered in performance culture. The company advances the research and practice of sensory studies by insistence on the value of disabled senses, expertise, and interpretive practice.
Keywords: disability, access, equity, art, technology