Emery Petchauer & Ruth Nicole Brown: The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by "rejecting the solidity of a frame" (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged between minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance sounds a formless formation, exploring integrity and wholeness among Black and Indigenous collectives that organize via radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about individual moral virtue but rather a collective ontological state of being whole.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)