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The title of this performance is taken from the 1855 California Vagrancy Act, a so-called race-neutral piece of legislation that attempted to frame Mexican Americans (a relatively new identity in the mid-nineteenth century) as loiters and idlers, as not peaceable and quite persons. This research-based performance, made in collaboration with Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt, examines normalized associations between criminality, sound, and coloniality, with special attention given to notions of silencing as a form of social control and voicing as a form of social resistance. How does noise come to be defined? Under what conditions are certain definitions of noise mobilized to maintain authority over marginalized communities? How is sound racialized? As an investigation into the politics of sound, US-Mexico relations, and questions of indigeneity, Not Peaceable and Quite contests institutionalized epistemologies by placing scholarly and academic writing on sound in proximity to experimental noise performance, ficto-criticism, and poetic recitation, redefining what kinds of auditory experiences are understood as acceptable and what kinds are understood as antagonistic, especially in the struggle over political, economic, and social equity.
Not Peaceable and Quite was made possible by The Boston Foundation's Boston Live Arts Grant and was initially performed at the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival (MST) in Calgary, AB, Canada. A version was also performed at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. In addition, the performance was made possible by the Poor Farm as part of The Working Group for Unmaking, by ACRE, and by the recording studio Rough Harmony. The performance project was also made possible as a result of research conducted for the panel "Latinx Sounds: Auditory Technologies of Resistance and Aural Practices of Social Transformation," which was selected by the US Latinx Art Forum for the 2019 College Art Association symposium. In addition, the project was supported in a different iteration by The Luminary as part of their Counterpublic exhibition.
As part of the Counterpublic exhibition the project took on the distinct form of the bicycle. Borrowing from the tradition of the amplified soapbox, the sidewalk musician, and other portable sound systems, the audio sculpture is completed when activated by a rider in public space. The path the bike takes not only maps the community of Latinx businesses on Cherokee Street, but also maps the rich sonic history of Latinx diaspora and migration amplifying mixed fragments of Cumbia that reflect and refract off the neighborhood. The bicycle used in the project has a specific and relevant history. In May 2018, the bike-sharing startup Ofo placed 750 dockless bikes around St. Louis. Two months later, they pulled out of the city in order to consolidate services in higher performing markets, like Seattle and San Diego. Not long afterwards, another bike-share company, Lime, withdrew from the city as well. Both companies reported high rates of repair and hundreds of missing bikes as factors in their decision to leave the St. Louis market. While Ofo is cited as having donated part of its fleet to the St. Louis-based nonprofit BWorks, the collected refuse of the bicycles remains as a kind of hauntological monument to the failed neoliberal promise of mobility and an on-demand lifestyle.
The path the bike takes not only maps the community of Latinx businesses on Cherokee Street, but also maps the rich sonic history of Latinx diaspora and migration amplifying mixed fragments of cumbia that reflect and refract off the neighborhood. Cumbia, as a culturally expressive form, functions as a vehicle of collective witnessing that plots a history of migration and intercultural contact between African, Indigenous, and European rhythmic and melodic styles.
Below is documentation of the project's various iterations, relevant research, and related texts.
