This project, Sān Gè Chinese at Højbro Plads, deconstructs the lyrics of of Tre Små Kinesere into bits, and uses Amazon Polly, a Text-to-Speech robot, to reinterpret the English translation of the lyrics in its Danish persona, the original (i.e., Danish) in its Chinese persona, and the Chinese one in its English persona. The piece works to posit this particular song- game in the context of Danish xenophobic and anti-immigrant politics, teasing the intertwined relationship between the cultural consensus and the political orientation. The rhythm is inspired by singer-songwriter FKA Twigs’s Pendulum and trans artists ARCA’s music at large.

Three Little Chinese

Remember That Day We Almost Died? Pt1

The political conflicts come to resolution less by the assemblage of confronting parts than by registering “the opposition as a composition of the parts”.[1] The subversive noises are dialectical to voices in the political soundscape in want of “cultural autonomy and support for differences or marginality.”[2] Given the global wake of our climate crisis, a renewed interest arises in taking noises from the social and natural undercurrent into account.

Food is often instrumentalized to question and challenge current forms of political power [3]; furthermore, the apple pie registers the intermediate vehicle to package planetary concerns into American households, yet a parody of the out-of-reach Green New Deal.[4] In a probe of “what if nature goes on strike,” the missing carbon sink [5], on the other hand, stretches climatic concerns from the local and national scale to the global network.[6] The kitchen, spatial metaphor for noise production, also becomes a proxy to the natural system, sites from forests and oceans that captures an excess of carbon-dioxide externalities of global carbon emission.

American Pie and the Sink is a multi-channel sound project which subverts the images of household goods for the purpose of noise production to include those we do not normally account for in the political landscape of climate change. The noises, collected from interviews and woods, bring immediacy to the Boston climate strike and bring us back down to Earth. [7]

[1] Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “Towards the Archipelago.” In The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture, 1–46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
[2] Attali, Jacques. “Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music.” In Noise and Politics, 2nd ed., 31–34. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
[3] Cooking Sections. The Empire Remains Shop. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018.
[4] Robinson, Eugene. “A ‘Green New Deal’ Sounds like Pie in the Sky. But We Need It.” Washington Post, February 7, 2019.
[5] Gabrys, Jennifer. “Sink: The Dirt of Systems.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 666–81.
[6] Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018.
[7] Ibid.

American Pie + The Sink

Angsila

W5u is an architecture and urbanism persona based in New England.

W5u

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