Pressure Project #3 Audio

Unfortunately I was too into the experience to record however, I created an audio ecomemory of corn. Ecomemory is a term coined by Melanie L. Harris in her book Ecowomanism. I wanted to illustrate through sound my African American experience with corn. In this Audio project, I wanted to integrate movement, agriculture and technology. I love to layer sounds to create stories. To begin I placed Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the dark as the base sound to provide soul and evoke spirit. I used my voice to give a brief history of Henry Blair the inventor of the corn planter, I also layered a recording of Micheal Twitty an African-American Jewish writer, culinary historian, and educator. He is the author of The Cooking Gene.

He sings a song called the “Whistling walk“. This was a song sung by enslaved folks when they walked down a walkway connected to the big house to serve food to indicate that they were not eating the food. This was layered with the sound of barking dogs with me saying ” hush puppy hush, hush puppy hush”. Hush puppies are made from corn meal and got their name because enslaved folks who liberated themselves would use these corn meal fried delights to keep dogs quite and off their trail. I then added my grandmother’s voice telling a story of her father and how they grew corn on his land. To close I ended with Micheal Twitty in his reconstructed version of the “Whistling walk” he sang, “no more whistling walk for me no more, no more. No more whistling walk for me many thousands gone.” This reconstructed song reclaims African American food labor for future generations who grow and work with food to heal as well as honoring those who had to suffer under chattel slavery.

As the audio played, for the movement aspect I passed around a picture of Henry Blair, a photo of my grandmother hugging me, a can of creamed corn, corn meal mix, and a whole ear of corn. These physical object served as tools of embodiment. I wanted the participants to actively listen, literally, by passing the objects around this put not only my personal memory in motion but also created new memories while evoking past memories. Sankofa is a Ghanaian proverb meaning looking back to go forward, go back and fetch it.

Below are a few photos of my classmates and Alex (the instructor of the course) holding the memory technology.