South LA Students Sounds Out The Crowd At UCLA Salon 02 UCLA May 24-6
by jbarrio4 | Jul 29, 2020 | BarnabyLab
May 2019
Join the USC NAI scholars and Foshay teens as they bring their exhibition to Salon 02, an urban humanities symposium and exhibition at UCLA. See LA 1992/LONDON 1780: SOUNDING OUT A CROWD, an exhibition highlighting the album, Never Say Die: A Sonic Tribute to the LA 1992 Rebellion, a compilation of sound projects inspired by studying the representation of two urban uprisings: the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, and the one that occurred more than twenty-five years ago in students’ own neighborhood. View LA 1992/London 1780 on Friday May 24th at the launch party. Then, come see the students at their talk and performance at the symposium on Saturday May 25th.
Based on an archive of collected sounds from South LA and lyrics imitating Dickens’ use of lists or catalogs, Never Say Die is a sonic documentary that remixes the novel’s storytelling about its city with the students’ own. The album is presented to visitors in an exhibition designed especially to complement this unique work of sonic expression. The exhibition is anchored by listening panels that juxtapose two images of civil unrest in the linked cities of the project, interlaced with strips of wheatpasted single covers designed by students. These are further detailed in a collection of album art and their inspiration. In this manner, the exhibition stages the listener’s experience of the album amid a fragmented visual and spatial language that continually suggests the task of collecting and reassembling perspectives.
Also on display at the exhibition is Resounding 1992: A Sonic Map of South LA. Highlighting the urban research method of sound scavenging, the map and a CD installation of collected sounds foreground the sonic archive as a collective work of art in its own right. The archive was geolocated above a base map detailing the destruction of the LA Rebellion, revealing proximities between the past and the present of students’ lived space. Each annotated location corresponds to a CD case in the accompanying installation to visually suggest the link between students’ singular process and the urban space all these sounds share. When open, the CD cases reveal hand-drawn maps and statements from students about their found sounds, and when closed, the covers form an image of a raven, a crucial symbol in the novel. Visitors to the exhibition at Foshay were invited to contribute to the map with their own sound or memory that represents what the community means to them.
View more photos from the exhibition here. Find out about the public humanities collaboration that produced it here.
LA 1992/London 1780 was supported by the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. Exhibition design by Kenny Wong (UCLA/Architecture &Urban Design/ Urban Planning). Data on Losses in the Los Angeles Civil Unrest provided by the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Luskin School of Public Affairs. #la1992london1780
The student projects featured here are the latest projects from LitLabs,immersive and interdisciplinary teaching projects interested in imagining what it means to be a 21st century South LA urban teen reader of literature. LitLabs are directed by Jacqueline Barrios, graduate student at UCLA English and public school teacher with the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative and Foshay Learning Center.
