Atayal Sound Map Workshop
Molmol Kuo
See a complete documentation and a selection of images of the Atayal Sound Map workshop and critique of the Tribe Against Machine summer camp here on Medium, a 15 minutes read.
This project is a result of a collaboration between the eight elementary students in SianBi Village, as well as the local Atayal artists and Yuma Taru; artist Ann Lee (@李秋芬); Lihang Studio Staff members Mayaw, and Ciwas Yuli; student assistant Noah Huang from Shih Chien University Fashion Design Department; and our sound walk tour guide, Miss B.
The eight rhombus symbols represent the Atayal villages between the flatland and Shei-Pa National Park. They are embroidered using conductive copper threads with an computer embroidery machine. Each symbol represents an Atayal eye and a gateway to a story shared by a student. A total of 8 stories and songs, as well as recordings of the environment, were embedded onto the map and can be activated by touching the “Atayal eye”.
A few words on Tribe Against Machine summer camp
I deeply appreciated this experience, which brought people together, and appreciated being there for the first ever workshop experience of its kind with the Atayal tribe. I want to thank the summer camp organizers: Shih Wei-Chieh, Chia-wei, Kamm, Yuma Taru and her families and staff, last but not least, the Mandarin Interpreter for the summer camp, Jessica Lou.
On my last day in Siang-Bi village, our guest house owner asked me if living here had been hard. He then spoke in a gentle, soft voice and said, “Living in the mountain is about problem solving”(克難 was his choice of word). That was the realest talk. (note: Realest. adjective — term created by Tupac Shakur to describe a state of being honest, truthful, raw and respected.)
The first day I arrived, an intern was leaving on the car that drove me there because of an eye infection. Later, many people were sick and some needed hospitalization. Returning to the guest house, I sometimes found poisonous snakes on my way and was so grateful that I didn’t get bitten during my late night outings on the mountain.
During my workshop, one of the most unusual events happened. One of the student suffered from the fear of height, but neither I nor my assistant had known this prior to taking our walk across the suspension bridge. We noticed that this student had shown discomfort and, once we started crossing as a group, she began to suffer a minor panic attack. Her movements became stiff and her palms sweaty; she could barely move, but she still pushed herself forward with the help of one of my assistants by her side and they crossed safely. After we had crossed to the other side, I sat and interviewed most of the students and made several recordings, except this one student, who didn’t want to be interviewed. Since the beginning, she had not been as verbal as other students, and she hardly shared any of her own words or story about herself.
Since the suspension bridge was the only way back, I asked her if I could clip the Lavalier mic (which attached to my phone using a recording app) onto her shirt and have it strapped with Velcro on her wrist when we crossed the bridge together. I told her that I would walk right by her side to hold her hand, and whenever she felt scared, she could just try to talk to me and into the microphone, I told her I would be recording and we would stop anytime she needed to. She agreed, and we began walking slowly towards the bridge. She was extremely quiet at first and, about one third across the bridge, she began talking to me. She started with a question to herself: “Why did the bridge have to be so high?” and then began telling stories about another bridge that she’d had to cross, an amusement park trip with her mother and her brother, stories about her mother and her brother, and so on and so forth. Then, we finished crossing the bridge together. What she did was incredible. Her palm was sweaty in my hand, but she passed the bridge excited that she had, and she could not stop telling stories to me for the rest of the way back to Lihang Studio. We seemed to have bonded over this experience.
What I didn’t realize was that while I’d warned her that the Lavalier mic attached to the collar was a sensitive device, I didn’t tell her that the mic was attached via a cable to the phone which was attached to her wrist. So while she was walking across the bridge and telling me all these amazing stories about her family and life, she was also nervously fidgeting with the audio cable which was within the reach of her fingers. As a result, while she spoke, she had been pulling the audio cable and had caused it to become loose from the phone jack. Sadly, none of her voice was captured faithfully. I had another handheld audio recorder in my hand while we crossed, which only partially captured her stories, instead recording more ambient and environmental sounds than her voice.
It was a painful moment for me when I realized that this moment which could not be replicated was lost and incomplete and couldn’t be documented the way I had expected, a moment which meant so much to me, to record a great young storyteller in her element, whose potential seemed to be brought out through suffering. However, this was a lesson about art making and its process, and the unpredictability of things. I read to myself an American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, whose essay on philosophy and literature later became an incisive treatise on the intelligence of emotions. In an interview with Bill Moyers (A World of Ideas/1989/Publisher: Doubleday/ISBN-13: 978–0385262781), she said, “ [Story and myth is]… very important, because I think that the language of philosophy has to come back from the abstract heights on which it so often lives to the richness of everyday discourse and humanity. It has to listen to the ways that people talk about themselves and what matters to them. One very good way to do this is to listen to stories” and that “The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
I can speak for myself as an artist that I believe this kind of human interaction was extremely valuable and crucial to me. I have always set to build work as a tool to help me interact with people on a social level, and to tell those story-living moments as an artist and researcher for humanity. Art making is experiential for me, and so it was between myself and the guest house owner, the young students, between Yuma Taru and her family and friends who so openly welcomed us in, between the group of visiting artists were invited via another three-week long e-textile summer camp, at Paillard Centre d’Art Contemporain & Résidence d’Artistes, Poncé sur le Loir, France (http://etextile-summercamp.org) that became potential future collaborators.
That being said, critique is also important to me, and there are a few things that I wish for the next edition of Tribe Against Machine:
One is to retain its location in the homes of the Aborigines in Taiwan, and bring more visitors from outside into the villages. There are many aspects and voices of the lives of Aboriginal indigenous people in Taiwan that required attention and amplification. I for one rooted for the singer Panai, her partner, Nabu, film maker Mayaw, and their protest in front of Legislative Yuan. Panai, as a group leader, had mobilized a group of followers and spent 118 days camped on Ketagalan Boulevard to protest regulations relating to Aboriginal land (videos, Taipei Times Articles on the issue).
Second, I think it is critical to involve the rest of the residents of the Aboriginal community who were neithers artists nor weavers. They were musicians, teachers, chefs, senior residents, working families, and younger children who could benefit from a festival or a form of celebratory activity that incorporates exhibitions, performance, concerts, workshops, open studios, food, culture and art fairs.
Lastly, I hope Tribe Against Machine will retain its experimental openness. It means all participants get together to create a safe space within which mistakes, failures, creativity and magic happen.
Molmol Kuo
molmol@yesyesno.com
YesYesNo.com