Reverberations Mixtape gathers artists, writers, and scholars through the format of audio fragments that ruminate on, resound with, and respond to the question of how to build futurity as a collective practice. In building a mixtape, we foreground the possibilities of sound as a transportation device for liberation and community building.

Following generations of Black feminist scholars, Reverberations approaches futurity in terms of insurgent gestures and ways of living that, in Tina Campt’s words, “striv[e] for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.” Often errant or wayward, journeys into the future involve multiple points of departure and arrival, with jumps across and beyond our worlds.

The collected contributions respond to the following questions: How do you imagine the future as a space of gathering? How can we listen to the past? What does the future sound like? Who are your fellow travelers/co-conspirators/comrades? What are your points of departure and arrival?

Reading aloud her poem “1947: Spell to Reverse a Line,” poet and performance artist Bhanu Kapil transforms verse into an incantation for working through the intergenerational trauma of India and Pakistan’s war of partition and the violence of borders. She poetically conjures healing for “Other women or non-binary folks | In the Punjabi diaspora,” but also for “anyone who needs it.” Recited out loud, the poem invites listeners to take part in a ceremony of casting the spell, as Kapil states, “Here. | Forever. | Now.”

In the soundtrack from artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s video Collapse, we hear looped, distorted, and layered audio ranging in source, from the films Battleship Potemkin and The Battle of Algiers to desert soundscapes and music produced by the artists in association with the underground rap and electronica scene in Ramallah. In the words of the artists, by bringing together and repeating “imaginary and actual moments of resistance and loss,” they aim to “critically reconstruct past fragments and uncover the suspension of the future in the present.”

Ersin Çelik and Şerif Çiçek, members of the Rojava Film Commune, reflect in Kurdish on the oral traditions of Dengbêjî and Çîrokbêjî. In the English transcript of their recording, they explain, “Each melody reminds us of our villages where we were born but could not grow up, our cities where we went to school but could not work.” Under conditions of oppression and the banning of Kurdish culture and language, such songs flow into shared “rivers of memory" and keep “imagination alive.”

Scholar Tanvi Solanki ruminates on the “somatophobia” of academic scholarship, which has a tendency toward “rendering null [...] embodied voices.” Listening to the “inscription of silence,” she articulates the profound collective basis of embodied speech, telling us: “In each voice, reverberations are heard not only of a unified ‘I’ but of the multitude of people the seemingly unified ‘I’ has conversed with.”

Assembling archival sound from 1960s and 1970s anti-war and anti-imperialist protests with recordings of recent demonstrations to end violence against Palestinians, artist Hồng-Ân Trương uses reverb effects to call attention to temporal echoes across social movements and highlight the critical role of listening for building political solidarities across time and space.

Artist Chitra Ganesh meditates on two texts from South Asia that envision non-hierarchical, collective, feminist, queer, and anti-caste futurities and plunge the listener into utopian futures through song and dreams. “Utopia is a constellation,” she reflects, “a potent crossroads where the deep past and far futures intersect. It asks us to step outside of clock time to marshal a sense of awareness that can transcend this moment.”

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Mixing and remixing Reverberations also created community amongst ourselves as the project organizers. Working across different fields as an art historian, geographer, and literary scholar, we came together online amid social distancing measures for the covid-19 pandemic. Computer microphones and speakers mediated our conversations and work. We assembled in short, fragmentary meetings interrupted by the demands of life under personal and geopolitical crises. These conditions animated our interest in sound as a medium that can create community and a striving for the future.

Futurity opens up multiple channels of possibility. We present the recordings in the intentional sequence of the mixtape, yet we also invite listeners to create their own journey through the tracks—stopping and starting, skipping around, dipping in and out. We invite you to pay attention to when, where, how, and with whom you listen. To repeat two of the questions we asked the contributors, who are your fellow travelers/co-conspirators/comrades? What are your points of departure and arrival?

— denisse andrade, Michele Chinitz, and Mia Curran