A Séance: A Call and Response
collaborative film by Ashanti Harris & Jen Martin
commissioned by V/DA for Sonic Seance: The Gathering exhibition at the Centre For Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 2019
A séance. A call and response. A meeting at which people attempt to make contact with the departed, with the ancestors, with the spirits, with those who came before, with the presence felt in the present.
Séances grew popular with the founding of the religion of spiritualism in the mid 19th century. Understanding the spirit world not as a static place but a space of continuous evolution, progression and advancement, spirits are believed to be more advanced than living humans, holding deeper knowledge and understanding of both the harmonies and discordant nature of being. Communication with the spirits through seances is thought to provide enlightenment.
Channelling the voices of others became popular among women who, in the mid 19th Century, were rendered voiceless in society. The practice encouraged believers to look inward and listen and speak. Through seances, women were un-silenced. No longer solely dependent on men, domestic work, or backbreaking shifts in the factories, women gained mobility as mediums, capable of possessing the power of foresight, oration and political influence. Armed with the authority of their “gifts” women were empowered to express anger and outrage at the civil and social injustices they experienced and observed. Practicing a new form of political resistance, seances became a revelation of experience, creating a platform for women to shape their own lives and the lives of those around them.
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In Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber, Chude-Sokai’s history of the universe identifies that Western Science has provided us with a myth of origins in the ‘Big Bang’ theory. The West’s obsession with cause and effect focuses on the process of contraction and expansion in the universe, mirroring its colonial ideologies. Chude-Sokai suggests it is the role of another kind of “science” to interrogate the metaphor in the term “Big Bang.”
Re-interpreting the “Big Bang” as a sonic phenomenon, creation becomes an echo of that primordial sound, a product of its sonic waves. Working from this re-interpretation we can regenerate one of the most crucial dialectics in human knowledge: Sound and Silence. “What bridges the two elements is echo, the traces of creation. If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.” In the Caribbean vernacular, “science” is another term for “bush magic” or the occult, which brings us back to the séance and its embodiment of dualities. Séances bridge the gap between the past and the present and the known and the unknown. Sonic Séance is an embodiment of the dialogic between sound and silence. Between the silencing of women and the sonority of their contrapuntal voices. Performing the intersection between voice, selfhood and power, Sonic Séance: The Gathering is a collective and collaborative interrogation of the “echo”; the experience of life as a tumultuous cacophony of polyphonic noise, speaking, screaming, crying, laughing, whispering, singing, explaining and articulating.
Audre Lorde famously said, “your silence will not protect you.” Sonic Séance: The Gathering is a conjuring of voices. Creating a space for people to come together and listen and speak. Channelling the voices of those who speak to us, through poetry, music, lectures and performances, Sonic Séance: The Gathering amplifies the things which resonate; giving the voices echoes reaching far. It is a tool of empowerment for the female voice and an invoking of consciousness.
Your silence will not protect you.
So, we speak
We séance
Ashanti Harris, 2019
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