Sound Cartographies of Uruguay: The power of sound to reimagine possible maps

Verónica Rey Azambuja ^[1]

University of the Republic (Uruguay)
Lifelong Learning Unit
Course: Urban Territorialities of Inhabiting
Teaching team: Daniel Fagundez; Veronica Blanco

Montevideo, February 2024

Summary

This article deals with productions carried out within the framework of the “Sound Map of Uruguay” and the project that derives from it: “Cartografías navegantes en la cuenca del Río Negro” (Navigating Cartographies in the Río Negro basin), aiming to deploy lines of critical thinking about the ways of inhabiting and territorialities. From a hybrid and non-hegemonizing stance, urban and ethnographic studies related to the approaches of the Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2008) and rhizomatic multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015) are resorted to. Sound will be treated, from its pure impermanence and incorporeality, as a fundamental part not only of the environment but also of the production of subjectivity and of the collective processes that are plotted. Thus, sound acquires diverse manifestations, from the voice of those who have a story to tell, to the presence of elements that mix and defy the limits of the usual maps.

Keywords: Sound cartography; subjectivity; inhabiting; thought; orality.

TRACES AND SOUNDS IN THE SOUND MAP OF URUGUAY

“The water and the technologies that made it possible to live and produce in the countryside, its simple, wonderful and healing choruses (…); the sounds that produced the food in our childhood, the people and the words that left a hole in the health of the community. Those that left a mark and sometimes a whole path traveled by songs, verses and chords; stories similar to those told by your grandmother; the Castegués or Portuñol that we denied in literary contests and in schools. Resounding landscapes that revive us; the work in the farms and the body to body with the cattle, the sweats that the postcard did not capture. The life that was, the one that is and the one that is collectively remembered; the voice of objects and engines that are already retired from the scene: all this and what you propose we put it in the Map. In the Sound Map of Uruguay”.

(Retrieved from www.mapasonoro.uy/project/)

The Sound Map of Uruguay is a project that was selected by the Competitive Funds of the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture, in the category Memory and Traditions, in its 2016 edition. The team was integrated by Cecilia Panizza in design, visual identity and photography; Diego Strasser in programming; Ana Rodríguez in phonography, production and dissemination; and Santiago Duce in photography. From the very description of the project, one can appreciate the presence of images that interrupt the hierarchical and essentialist view of the subject and give our thoughts hints of subtle and heterogeneous landscapes.

A map is linked to a possibility of organizing life and the environment, therefore it shows “our ability to form or deform reality, it is a reflection of our vision of the world” (Cerdà, 2012, p.150). The Sound Map of Uruguay expands realities from the margins and gives rise to minimal aspects of everyday life that are not usually taken into account. With a sensorial proposal that moves away from the preponderance of sight, sound is a way to open ways to territories and modes of existence that enhance our creative capacity to think about reality.

The fact that we turn to sound maps in a sensorial way demonstrates a gesture that does not point directly to the faculties of logocentric reason, but to that other form of thought that has to do with sensation and affections. There is also a special subtlety in what refers to sound, in relation to its evanescence and its mutable and diffuse reality. Sound information (Cerdà, 2012) configures reality with layers of multiple and moving flows that coexist but without creating a unity. And “to read this reality is to bring into contact unforeseen aspects closer to the immaterial than to the physical” (Cerdà, 2012, p. 146).

In this way, the sound recordings we encounter will have more to do with the cartography proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (2015) than with the maps that predominate in universal worldviews. The sound map can then be thought of as a rhizome, in that it does not respond to a given model or structure, and above all it does not propose a new imitable and static model. On the contrary, it presents light, shifting maps, with ephemeral and changing coordinates, but capable of generating senses and affections.

Maps will be contingent because inhabiting and spaces are contingent. Open to becoming, the ways of being in the world compose universes (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013) that never stop updating relationships and possible maps. The mapped sonorities thus overflow the known map of Uruguay, perforating it: they illuminate intensity areas and ways of inhabiting between the porosities of the borders and the becomings that pass and passed through them.

The sound map crosses contingencies and makes them audible. Narratives that often have human voices appear, but they are always combined with other sonorities that account for the hybridizations of the territories and their incidence on the ways of existing and being in space. Sounds of frogs and crickets, as well as dialects arising from the mixture of border languages, are brought to the forefront. The sonority of metals and work tools. The relationship with the environment and the animals of the countryside; with water and the sonorities of the river. The production of subjectivity from songs that travel through time loaded with affection and memory. Grandmothers, tradition, what no longer is but somehow remains. All of them are strange itineraries (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013) and intensive features that connect the present and the past with unthinkable but current traces.

Narrative plurality becomes inevitable. Far from generating discursive centralities, we have the opportunity to deploy their meanings to expand our capacity for perception and thought. The edges of communities are continuously altered, and the role of narrative, according to Salazar (2011) is to open spaces in them, without prescribing to self-enclosed truths.

In this way we can attend to the ways in which communities narrate themselves (Salazar, 2011) without hardening processes and encapsulating meanings. Narratives, like maps, open themselves to the future, share their wanderings and indeterminacies. They remain open to forces and entities that act both within the territories and outside it, as a mark or insinuation of possible lines of escape. “For it is not about establishing a promised land, but a particular path where meaning emerges, momentarily illuminating the historical and political character of an action that takes responsibility for others without subjecting them” (Salazar, 2011, p.106).

MAPS AND AGENCIES

El Resorte ^[2]

El Resorte is a place “built by friendship” where memory and music -especially tango – are celebrated. The boliche, as it is called by the locals, belongs to the Soarez family, from Tacuarembó, one who is committed to keeping local music and culture alive. Located in the Centenario neighborhood, the bar serves as a meeting place for the so-called bohemian generation of Tacuarembó, those musicians and singers who have been “lost over the years”.

As a meeting point for the People’s song, El Resorte harbors an aesthetic richness populated by references to traditional culture and music, intertwined with allusions to the family’s passion for cycling. Objects as heterogeneous as trophies and bicycles, guitars, televisions, drinks and flags converge with bodies and entities that expose the hybrid character of the space in which, according to Farías (2011), the social happens. El Resorte shows us a form of urban assemblage that shows how associations between human and non-human entities (Latour, 2008) produce the emergence of new spaces and new forms of collective action.

Thus, the city acquires a notion of multiplicity and mobility that detaches it from the image of an outside (Farías, 2011) to show that it can enter and be found inside a particular enclosure. And, at the same time, it does not cease to be dissipated in other simultaneous spaces. Thus, the urban, as well as the social – according to Latour’s (2008) -, are not given things, but emerge in those associations that intertwine and concatenate corporealities, materialities and semiotics (Farías, 2011). Neither actors nor objects are social in themselves, because the social is in the connections and meanings that are created in the hybridization of all of them.

It is important to highlight how, in a place like El Resorte, dedicated to the preservation of memory and tradition, new events and meanings are generated without entering into contradiction with permanence. Among objects that witness and celebrate the passage of time; always a becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015) passes through them.

And it is that “the social cannot be reduced to a type of entity or medium such as intention, meaning or communication. Rather, social relations imply relations of force between the different entangled elements, which make their inter-action possible” (Farías, 2011, p. 18). Like the chords of an old tango that make the guitars vibrate and that sound again in a new time and place; the invisible sound waves travel and alter space.

Nilda Amaral performs Basquadé Inchalá,
a Charrúa-inspired song.
El Resorte, Tacuarembó. 2017

“What the signs in everyday life tell us of what’s to come?”

 This recording brings together some of the inhabitants of Estación Migues, Canelones, who, by way of anecdotes, bring to the present beliefs and customs that people had in the past. The narration takes place in the form of a conversation that allows the inhabitants to weave a story between their own memories and what others’ memories provoke in them. The stories gather memories of their family homes and neighbors that have to do with what in other times was associated with the presence and singing of some birds, considered signs of what could happen. “Agüerías” is the name Héctor proposes for the topic of conversation, a concept linked to the ancestral beliefs, common in many indigenous cultures and transmitted from generation to generation, as a way of understanding the world and predicting the future.

Little matters the validation of some verifiable truth in this map; but what is narrated from the land of origin, its traditions and stories (Benjamin in Salazar, 2011). According to Salazar (2011, p.103): “what is narrated is the memory of affections, of encounters and separations with others”, narration has the power to institute a memory and articulate a history of its own.

Being on the margins of the truths of positivist rationality, these stories show us the mixture and impurity of encounters and becomings that produce multiplicities, populations and tales (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015). Traditional narratives do not revere transcendentalized powers (Salazar, 2011) but rather make their way with a sympathy for circumventing divine laws or making use of nature to face their destiny.

The stories are populated by presences (Salazar, 2011). The song of the benteveo, the flight of the tero, the sound of the owl or even a storm. Presences carrying affections and velocities that in this case go beyond the human to open the space to a indeterminacy or uncertainty zone. “Something common or indiscernible, an environment that makes it impossible to say where the border between the animal and the human lies” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015, p. 275). The magical or supernatural elements that shape superstitions have to do with those ways of dwelling close to the unknown, to other natures. In Salazar’s words, “in the narrative, collective memory is created and no definitive attachment to the fundamental principles of any morality is affirmed” (2011, p.105).

Those who tell these stories, whether they believe it or not, know these beliefs well, because they were part of their childhood and were repeated as warnings or omens. Several of them say they do not believe in these things, but that it happened, it happened. “Maybe it is superstition but they have lived it, maybe one is more sensitive and you hear it more. There was no radio or television, people were more perceptive to what they heard and what they saw. There are still superstitions of the old days”.

We can attribute to these superstitions what Salazar (2011) attributes to the moral, as “an act of externalized memory (that) slips into the future under a much more subtle modality than the normative prescription, one that it is much more powerful in its capacity to affect” (p. 105). It is not by chance that, according to its etymology, the word superstition derives from the Latin superstitio, that is, that which remains, that which survives the passage of time.

Navigating Cartographies

Cartografías Navegantes (Navigating Cartographies) is a program carried out within the framework of the Competitive Fund for the Negro River Initiative. It proposes cultural activities that encompass the sound experience in the landscape, the filming of interviews, mail art and collective mapping of the Negro River Basin. During the months of January and February 2023, an exhibition of these records was open to the public.

The project is directed by Ana Rodríguez and Manuel Gianoni, in the scope of the initiatives to “Strengthen the Negro River Basin Commission”; implemented by a Competitive Fund involving the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries (MGAP) and the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM) of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay.

The objectives are to contribute to the integrated management of water resources, develop narratives and generate an identity and sense of belonging in the Negro River Basin by recognizing the socio-environmental values of the territory and raising awareness of the perception of the landscape in its multiple dimensions.

Fishing Nets / Networks ^[3]

To be able to speak of inhabiting it is necessary to think in a space, that is, in that dimension of time that allows materialities to gain expression and consistency. To inhabit is to build, to vibrate with space and to act in it: “we construct buildings and we construct senses for life and both are closely related” (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013, p. 3) because with them and among them the nodes of the networks we inhabit are composed.

While the effects of positivism impoverish the image of the subjective, reducing it to an isolated interiority; everyday life is populated by elements that evidence its inherent social bond (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013). Spatialities allow the encounter with other subjectivities and agents of multiple natures, so that they cannot be treated as devoid of vitality, but as “a zone of entanglement that breaks any boundary that we can define between the interiority of an organism and the exteriority of the world” (Ingold in Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013, p.10).

Space is linked to time and allows us to sustain assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015), which are open, changing and susceptible to disappear, but are producers of subjects and collectivities; memory, politics and poetics. Inhabiting gives us tools to map the subjective and dynamic expressions of spaces and to “deploy a perspective for which “the design process occurs in the whole of the flows of “socio-natural” life” (Alvarez Pedrosian, Blanco Latierro, Fagundez D’Anello, Moreira Selva, 2023, p.104). To inhabit is always to inhabit in a network, and it is among networks that the compositional dimension of inhabiting becomes perceptible.

Relational networks evidence a communicating function that goes beyond the signs and regimes of language. The connections are multiple and articulate semiotics of any nature in wefts of mediations (Álvarez Pedrosian et al., 2023) that connect them in very diverse ways: “biological, political, economic links, etc. putting into play not only regimes of different signs, but also statutes of states of affairs” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015, p.13).

Networks are hatched rhizomatically, and a rhizome “can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015, p. 18) and is always susceptible to being remade and undone.

Spatiality is not given, it is woven, interrupted, modified; and in its dynamism diverse forms of existence are generated as a juxtaposition of knotted spatio-temporalities, “sometimes changing the keys of location, others reinforcing them” (Alvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013, p.11). The importance of everyday aesthetics becomes notorious when investigating and generating strategies of collective transformation. Subjects, materialities, bodies and forces do not cease to affect each other and generate vital and territorial links. In the same way that inhabiting and places are constructed. Through meaning.

Thus the subject becomes a subject of possibility (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013), he is not isolated from the conditions and relationships in his environment but neither is he fixed in them. The relational network affirms the creative and transformative possibility that everything existing in reality has on it. Open to the informal force of the adventitious, the subject “can transform determinations, can create new conditions, materialities and meanings, can inhabit. To inhabit is to construct senses” (Álvarez and Blanco, 2013, p.8).

Mercedes of the old Hum

Mercedes of the Hum is a bride
that perfumes the rose garden
land of the indigenous potter
freshness of the willow’s ground

This map is located in the city of Mercedes, a place that has a special relationship with the largest internal river in Uruguay: Negro River (Río Negro). We hear the story of a woman who tells us in a few minutes what the river is and means to her, as well as to all those who had the opportunity to be born in these lands or to live near it. The story opens a space of temporal but also ethnic mixtures: Mercedes of the old Hum contains vestiges of the indigenous populations that inhabited these lands and also echoes of the name they used to give to the world Hum.^[4] A word that means black in Guarani and, in Guenoa, “to me”, “to us”: the river that runs in us, “our river”.

That surviving name also emerges in the creation of a poet who wrote, in a time different from that of the indigenous people, a song for his city, “Viejo Hum“, inseparable from the river that flows through it. Hernán Viera Castro, born in Mercedes in 1930, constructs verses that are images of a there and a now, distant for our current looks but that testify a way of thinking and living between the city and the river.

Another man, years later, chooses the name he wants to give his daughter: Mercedes del Hum; as the song says, as the land crossed by the river is known. Mercedes is the one who gives her voice to the story of this map and tells us that the name her father gave her was an act of love. To inhabit is to take care of what grows (Álvarez and Blanco, 2013), it refers to shelter and support.

It is demonstrated that a map is always several maps at the same time, it is the place of the interstice. A map becomes “a dynamic movement that combines with the concept of border crossing or intersection of mobile elements” (Cerdà, 2012, p.152). It is thus that edges and crossings generate spaces for the unforeseen, mocking the logics of cause and origin. A situated thinking implies looking at those spaces, and starting the analysis always there, in between.

And with sounds of wind and birds mingling with her voice, Mercedes narrates:

“I believe that the river is very inspiring for art. People have sung to the river and painted it. It is fundamental, it is the cradle of poets. I was named Mercedes del Hum. The artist is very related to that, when you have space, because it is a place that gives you the possibility to contemplate, to listen, to look. It gives you another time. Art emerges in that transitional space, a space of play and contemplation. We are a bit like we inhabit”.

Image retrieved from Google

Listening to fishermen: Rincón del Bonete Lake

This recording focuses on a group of fishermen from San Gregorio de Polanco and Paso de los Toros who tell us about their concerns about the increasing disappearance of some fish species in the region. On the other hand, as a rhizome, the emerging story can operate as one of the many ways to enter a broader and more complex map that accounts for the networks and associations in which it is immersed. A map has multiple entrances and exits (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015) “Where to begin then? As always, it is best to begin in the middle of things, in medias res” (Latour, 2008, p.47). A situated look positions us between the departments of Durazno and Tacuarembó and what passes through the middle: the Rincón del Bonete Lake.

Rincón del Bonete Lake is considered an artificial lake, because it is a reservoir resulting from the construction of the first hydroelectric dam in the country, in 1945, on the waters of the Negro River. With it, the town Rincón del Bonete was established, destined to give housing to the workers of the dam and their families, causing a movement of the surrounding towns to the new territorial settlement, as well as work and neighborhood networks. In this way, we can see that the dam, since its inauguration, acts and is part, in an active way, of the emerging reality.

According to the postulates of the Network Actor Theory (NAT) (Latour, 2008), it would be appropriate to speak of socio-technology, a term that returns this active role to entities traditionally conceived as mere technical instruments. With the NAT, it is not possible to differentiate between the technical and the urban in a biased manner, since socio-technical agents are key mediators of urban phenomena.

The Rincón del Bonete lake is the largest in the country and is where the fishermen who give voice to this map have been fishing for decades, they say they had a fishermen’s cradle, in the sense that they are sons, brothers, grandsons of fishermen. Artisanal fishing is a trade that was passed down from generation to generation, which they learned from the old fishermen who are no longer on the land, and, beyond the technique, it implies a conglomerate of knowledge that speaks of a close relationship with the lake. To dedicate oneself to fishing is to know the water as well as the cycles and behaviors of the life forms it shelters; it is to have learned to hear and understand the lake. Artisanal fishing tells us about a way of living that goes beyond the dwelling (Álvarez Pedrosian and Blanco Latierro, 2013), expanding the concept to those spaces that are is repeatedly passed by, linking senses and perceptions.

Even when that space exceeds the mainland, fishermen have created and sustained practices and resources that allow them to enter relationships of strength and apprehension in an environment as uncertain and shifting as the river. “In the interaction with the maritime-coastal environment, the challenge of the encounter with the unknown, which implies a daily adventure, and of dealing with the unexpected, with more dynamic and unpredictable characteristics than those attributed to the land, stands out” (D’ambrosio Camarero, 2017, p.34).

It is in this area of openness and uncertainty that the problem of this story is situated. The fishermen of Rincón del Bonete, faced with the effects that pollution has had on the quantity and variety of fish in the lake, decided to get together and think of measures to preserve the fish. They decreed a month of closure each year during which none of them can fish, choosing the period from October to November because they consider that it is the time of the year of greatest spawning. “That’s what we believe, based on our knowledge from years of being on the margins, fishing and observing the water,” says Walter, who has fished since he was 7 years old and grew up around the river’s shore.

In spite of their efforts, the fishermen tell us that the biggest problem they have is the abrupt change in the water level when the dam gates open and the water from the lake flows into the river. They have been speaking out for years about the devastating effects this may have on the survival of the fish. As Wilmar tells us, the tararira is a fish that spawns “in the shallows”, at 10 or 15 centimeters, “because the little fish need the dirt of the shore to hide from predators when they are born. The tararira makes a hollow nest in the ground and takes care of it. The next day the water level drops and those eggs remain exposed, and they die”.

Although the change in the water level is necessary for the generation of electric power, they ask Ute (The State-owned company of energy production and distribution) to respect the closed month, since fish such as the tararira are at risk of disappearing from our waters. “It kills millions of fish. Let the world know what is happening to the fishermen”, Walter assures that they have sent letters to all the authorities and have not received any answer, “we live in a world where the big corporations rule. We don’t have a vote or a say.”

D’ambrosio Camarero (2017) refers to how coastal populations have often been studied as isolated populations and, “yet they are part, to a greater or lesser degree, of the urban-industrial society, while presenting a certain cultural heritage based on social and symbolic practices that are considered traditional” (Adomilli in D’ambrosio Camarero, 2017, p.37). Apart from the economic and quality of life repercussions that the decrease in fishing brings on these fishermen and their families; these coastal inhabitants speak out to raise awareness to the preservation of the life of their aquatic fauna. They ask to be heard and to be protected by some measure that commits in a more responsible way with the reality of the Negro River. This would require a political rationality that recognizes the integral and multi-relational character of socio-nature and the importance of a transversal approach that does not exhaust the resources of the environment of which we are a part, especially in these times of environmental crisis and vertiginous changes.

CONCLUSIONS

The principles of mobility, impermanence, connection and composition are some of the notions inherent to the phenomena of inhabiting and of territorialities. Thus, the approach from which they are thought of needs to be nourished by similar characteristics. In order to deal with multiplicities, it is necessary to generate hybrid approaches and conceptual frameworks (Cerdà, 2012, p. 153) to produce new modes of knowledge.

The Sound Map of Uruguay covers both urban and rural territories, and although the growth of the urban, in terms of mobility and form of relationship, has overflowed this dichotomy, the reading is still twofold. The increasingly notorious deployment of cities needs those peripheral sites that serve as support (Álvarez Pedrosian et al., 2023), and which are retracted but without disappearing completely. It is necessary to accept the worlds as they are shown, that is, mixed (Cerdà, 2012). The processual character of the city, of the urban and of all kinds of territorialities exposes links of implication (Álvarez Pedrosian et al., 2023) between territories and territorialities, as well as textures and edges that are permeable to new forces and forms of configuration.

A poetics of crossing and mixture allows us to attend to the coexistence of diverse realities and ways of inhabiting territories, finding in the aesthetic a form of access to them. Aesthetics shines in the impermanent and allows us to consider and value that which appears regardless of its provisional character. Everything is expressed as a way of appearing in the world that is absolutely singular, in such a way that what happens, can be heard or looked at, can be thought of. This is the place from which social psychology, ethnography, and an endless number of other disciplines can think: from the paradigm of creativity (Guattari, 1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Álvarez Pedrosian, E. & Blanco Latierro, V. (2013). Componer, habitar, subjetivar. Aportes para la etnografía del habitar. Bifurcaciones, 15.

Álvarez Pedrosian, E., Blanco Latierro, V., Fagundez D’Anello, D., & Moreira Selva, S. (2023). Comunicación y subjetividad en las etnografías del habitar: una perspectiva desde los estudios culturales urbanos y territoriales. Cuadernos Del Claeh, 42 (117), 99–114.

Cerdà, J. (2012). Observatorio de la transformación urbana del sonido: La ciudad como texto, derivas, mapas y cartografía sonora. Arte y Políticas de Identidad, 7, 143–162. Retrieved from. https://revistas.um.es/reapi/article/view/174011

D’Ambrosio Camarero, L. (2017). Leer el mar: una etnografía habitando la costa, la tierra y el mar, con surfistas, pescadores artesanales y biólogos, en un balneario del Este de Uruguay [PhD thesis, Universidad Nacional de San Martín].

Deleuze, G; Guattari, F. (2015) Mil Mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Valencia: Pre-textos.

Farías, I. (2011). Ensamblajes urbanos: La TAR y el examen de la ciudad. Athenea Digital. Revista de Pensamiento e Investigación Social, 11(1).

Guattari, F. (1991) “Guattari: el paradigma estético”. Revista Zona Erógena. Nº 10. Buenos Aires, November 1991.

Latour, B. (2008). Reensamblar lo social: una introducción a la teoría del actor red. Manantial.

Salazar, C. M. (2011). Comunidad y narración: la identidad colectiva. Tramas (México, DF), (34), 93-111.

NOTES

^[1] Verónica Rey Azambuja, born in October 1992 in Salto, Uruguay. She has a degree in Psychology since 2021, from the Faculty of Psychology, University of the Republic. She is currently pursuing a degree in Visual Arts at IENBA, Faculty of Arts. She is dedicated to clinical psychology and research, directing her focus towards the ways that life intersects with art and opens unexpected paths and maps.

^[2] Photographs by Cecilia Panizza, retrieved from Mapa Sonoro de Uruguay.

^[3] Images of the exhibition Cartografías navegantes en la cuenca del Río Negro; Mercedes, February 2023. Photographs by Manuel Gianoni, obtained from Instagram account Cartografías Navegantes.

^[4] Source: ¿Conoces el río Negro o Hum?