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Unsettling Scores is a three-part online program curated by Liquid Architecture for MUMA in conjunction with the exhibition Samson Young: Real Music, with expanded works published on Liquid Architecture’s journal, Disclaimer.
This second edition is the premiere of a new conceptual score conceived collaboratively by Navajo Nation composer Raven Chacon and Carcross/Tagish curator and writer Candice Hopkins. To be published in three parts—or Dispatches, as the artists declare—the work draws from Chacon and Hopkins's reflections on the fight for cultural preservation and defence of Indigenous sovereignty at the Standing Rock Reservation Water Protector encampment in 2016. Dispatch #1 (The Call), published below, sets the scene with a short statement of political intent, followed by a roll-call of the 'Players' as they prepare to begin the piece. Dispatches #2 and #3 will follow on 30 September through MUMA's socials and on Disclaimer. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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Raven Chacon &
Candice Hopkins
Dispatch #1: The Call
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This rock is under threat.
We need to gather here to protect it.
Our actions begin and end at this place.
PLAYERS:
Hosts – People who live and have lived here for centuries.
Spiritual leaders – Indigenous people from any tribe or nation.
Front line activists – (Native and non) ready and willing to engage directly with police, militia, or construction crews.
Militant Indigenous people – Group of their own. Willing to engage in direct action. Not necessarily in collaboration with front line activists or the hosts.
Narcs – (Native and non) undercover police. Any one participant can be a narc.
Reporters – Chronicle for those outside the grounds (as well as inside the grounds).
Politicians – Bring attention. Appear to be listeners. Also there for face time.
Counter-surveilers – To surveile the police and encroachers.
Helpers* – (Native and non) brings supplies, food, or a necessary skill. Stays out of the way. Take minimal space and resources.
Witnesses* – Listen and observe.
Artists – Engage in creativity, but also self-agenda/promotion. Has the potential to aid the camp in forming its identity. Their artwork can use up resources (water, heat, electricity).
Gatekeepers – Maintain the entrance to the camp. Vet those who enter. A host or trusted by the hosts.
Temporary campers/sympathizers – Bring attention to the cause, temporarily. Cannot or do not know how to belong to the camp.
Others – Tourists, those without a home, others.
At a minimum, participants should join with the intent of taking the role of a witness or helper.
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Raven Chacon
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Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise, to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts, Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith, developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and Indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, where he taught string-quartet composition to hundreds of Native American high-school students on reservations in the American Southwest.
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Candice Hopkins
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Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer and researcher interested in history, art and indigeneity, and their intersections. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She was senior curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, and worked on the curatorial teams for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019, and documenta 14, 2017. Her writings on history, art and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver Press, New York University, the Fillip Review and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Hopkins has lectured widely including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale, Tate Britain and the University of British Columbia.
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Liquid Architecture
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For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.
Our program stages encounters and creates spaces for sonic experience, and critical reflection on sonority and systems of sonic affect. To do this, we host experiences at the intersection of contemporary art and experimental music, supporting artists to produce performances and concerts, exhibitions, talks, reading groups, workshops and recordings in art spaces, music venues and other sites.
Liquid Architecture is curatorially driven and our methodology embraces research, collaborations and imaginations. We want to echo beyond local conversations, problems, debates and questions, to reverberate across media and disciplines, and so to sound out new discourses about the audible world, and beyond.
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Image courtesy of the artists
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