Event Details

AquaSonos: On Undoing and Undrowning and a Pathway to Self-Liberation

Join us for a talk with composer Dameun Strange, who will share about his work, Our Boat: Notes on Senegal—on view in Insurgent Ecologies—which follows his journey to West Africa and the attempt to undo the genetic trauma related to the Middle Passage, the forced voyages of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.

Strange uses sound to explore the ways these events manifested in lifelong aquaphobia. In this lecture, Strange will share images from the project and discuss how this work serves as a journal of his re-crossing the Atlantic. He will also discuss how the work allowed him to move away from traditional Western Music notation to graphic scoring and the use of improvisation, field recordings, and other "found sounds" in his music, serving as the prelude to his series of works about our relationship with water called AquaSonos.