La Memoria es un Pájaro, or multimedia poetry in the drift

ABSTRACT

This essay meditates on multimedia and sound artist Pablo Francisco Morales’s solo exhibition La Memoria es un Pájaro at the Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura (IMAC) in Tijuana during early summer 2022. Morales’ work opens the social and psychic experience of mourning through mediatic dispersal across audio, video, photography, dramatising how mourning’s demands on signification unsettle material and perceptual reality. The exhibition also invites a hemispheric and regional approach to sound art rooted in the borderlands, which links Morales’ decidedly semiotic and transmedial conception of sound art to broader questions about social and political genealogies for its theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimedia
• mourning
• metaphor
• sound art
• borderlands

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

2. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

3. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

4. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

5. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

6. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

7. For further exploration of his work with language, please visit Eme’s artist website at http://franciscoeme.com/. His Parralel Planes/Planos Paralelos, in particular, examples Spanglish functions as a social form that is taught, transmitted and differently constitutive or barred in a public sphere. The multi-part work unfolds across interactive installation, sculpture, sound pieces, video work, text and photography. Comparably vast, conceptual multimedial work addresses themes violence and law (Treatise on Violence: The Invention of Us), place, embodiment and technology (Two Voices/Dos Voces) and sound and mobility in urban space (Homo Mobilis).

8. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

9. Heldiz (2019) explains that, in 1957 San Ysdiro became part of a city District that is broken into two segments and separated on a north-south axis by the city of Chula Vista, the seventh largest in California.

10. This epitomised what feminist essayist Cristina Rivera Garza (2020 & 2022) calls the “visceraless state”, a historical condition within which, in her words, “life, human life, and life altogether, the life of plants and the life of animals, no longer deserved the attention and care of the state”..

11. Armando de la Torre in conversation with the author.

12. See 2019 for a discussion that links acute air pollution crisis to lines at the Port of Entry’s vehicle crossing.

13. See Casa Familiar (undated) for a discussion of the organisation’s political ambivalence towards City Hall remains. Casa Famliar’s commitment to economic and organisational self-determination continues to push back against the City’s ability to interve in San Ysidro’s public image and political economy.

14. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

15. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

16. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

17. Interview with the author, 11 July 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Cimini

Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist and teacher and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her work addresses power, community and technology in 20^th & 21^st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. She is author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (OUP 2022) and co-editor of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions 2020) with composer and theorist Bill Dietz. Other articles are on race and digital art curation; political genealogies in feminist music theory; listening, militarization and abolition and regional experimental music and sound art communities.