Rhythming with radio: midnight steps to reclaim the city

Amanda Gutiérrez’s radiophonic soundwalk Resilience, midnight steps and the moon as guide from A to Z was a commission for Radio Insomnia, presented with members of Brujas and Tribu Collectives. Brujas now operates as RedArtFEM (Red de Mujeres Artistas y Feminista). The initiative aims to act as a social resource for artists as a response to the lack of representation of Latin American people in the art scene in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Midnight steps was their first artistic intervention.

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It was a warm summer night when we all met around the public seats of a square in the industrial zone of Canal Lachine in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. The clock ticked midnight on 7 July 2023. Amanda Gutiérrez arrived from her nearby studio, gathering with a group of female and queer immigrant artists from South America to lead us on a two-hour soundwalk to be live broadcast for Radio Insomnia. The broadcast launched earlier that evening from an exhibition space and would continue until 6am.¹ That night, Radio Insomnia’s program focused on social issues of night-time and the politics of wakefulness. Radio Insomnia asks, when wakefulness is embraced rather than endured, can night-time radio connect us as if we were lying shoulder to shoulder? Awake, as insomniacs, we are listeners. We are listening rather than sleeping for the sake of productivity.² Can radio help us to tighten our ears — to listen to the night’s signals and create intimate spaces for exchange and collective listening?

The night felt still as we seized it — yet it was full of sounds, of the wind in the trees, crickets and occasional passers-by. During the walk, Nicolas Montgermont and I — co-curators of Radio Insomnia — took turns to carry a mobile broadcast set-up with two hand-held voice microphones that roved between members of the group of twenty. One of us held a perch with a big, fluffy directional mic that conveyed ambient sounds of the street, and was strapped with a mixer, listening and adjusting the levels of voices from other mics. The other listened to the web radio stream on their phone to ensure it was uninterrupted while walking away from the sound source to hear the radio more clearly, occasionally taking a seat for a rest and a cigarette. 

Moving as one through the night, a rhythmic soundscape emerged from the walk, punctuated by chimes, bells, songs and stomping sounds. We intermittently stopped to form a listening circle in which stillness settled in between slow stints of walking and sound making. Voices shifted between Spanish, English and French as artists shared, in their preferred language, stories and reflections on their relationship to night-time. Often these stories were related to violence. Experiences were beyond words as emotions and voice intonations carried stories themselves. Artists had collaboratively workshopped performative gestures, proposing a prompt for the group that reflected on what it means to walk at night as a racialised woman and sharing a symbolic object to share with the group or make sound with: house keys, a sound bowl, bells and wooden objects. 

Night amplifies the social issues of daytime as insecurity and discrimination further reduce access to the city and to night, particularly in South America. Around 1am, two white men going fast on city bikes weaved by our group, shouting in Québécois to reclaim their right of way over predominantly women of colour occupying the shared path along the canal. In a way, this was a non-event as it only illustrated the stories of the group and became comical. At that time, a woman was explaining how they always carry the fear of abuse, even in places such as Tiohtià:ke/Montréal in comparison to Rio de Janeiro. The very personal aspects of the story combined with the immigrant experience felt important as private moments were shared on air. The walk itself wasn’t open for public attendance (in contrast to previous radiophonic soundwalks led by Gutiérrez to occupy space collectively) to prioritise trust within the group and liberate words. This helped one to become a speaker and share at times, traumatic events. Recently, I talked to Amanda about the piece; it became clear that the radiophonic apparatus played an important role in enabling speech and listening within the group, as mics were directly feeding into the radio stream (not amplified, heard back on the street) — enhancing listening to each other.

Radio not only amplifies voices but frames listening. More than giving voice to minorities and transmitting them, the broadcast helps us to listen further to one another; 'it helps us to become ears', says Gutiérrez, 'feminist ears'. Here, feminist ears refer to theorist Sara Ahmed’s description of a collective practice of listening, a 'tactic' to resist institutional and systemic violence.³ As such, the work not only occupies public space but also reclaims it. As author and educator bell hooks understands, reclaiming includes the attribution of new meaning and is a symbol of empowerment. It often involves talking back to the very system of oppression.⁴ With a mobile set-up, the radio apparatus conveyed the situatedness and performativity of speech, sound making and listening within the work for rewriting the city. 

To me, feminist ears are also attuned to the temporality of listening. By understanding and playing with listening as taking time — as composer Pauline Oliveros demonstrated — listening generates new rhythms. ⁵ Listening often slows down time or makes time disappear. These are aspects that converged in Radio Insomnia’s program by commissioning artists interested in sound as a measure for time, time stretch as well as allowing for durational work, such as Amanda Gutiérrez’s piece. To be cast out of time, whether insomniac or not, is a form of othering. Radio Insomnia creates shared time through listening during night-only and live broadcasts. In this way, rhythming is beyond soundscape, such as the sound of bells and batons rattling against handrails produced during the walk that echoed on the acoustic mirror of the river through radio waves and slipped into listeners' bedrooms. Rhythming means interrupting the normalised flow of time of patriarchal capitalism and setting alternative rhythms to reclaim night-time through listening. 

At the end of the walk, the pre-recorded material we had programmed bought us some time off-air to thank the collective, pack up our technical set for the next part of the live program, and hop in a taxi back to the studio, where the program ended. Recording and broadcasting live directly from a mobile phone in the taxi, we talked to our driver and heard about his night, his radio taste and his children as city lights flashed above our heads. 

Rhythming is a disruption of normative temporal structures and their exclusionary mechanisms — Midnight Steps made us experience rhythming with collective movement, listening and broadcasting to create intimacy, solidarity and agency in public space. 

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Working with exhibitions, public programs, and radio, Anabelle Lacroix is particularly interested in the overlapping field of curating and writing, involving performance, sound, speech and publishing. Radio Insomnia is created in collaboration with sound artist Nicolas Montgermont and emerged from their practice-based research titled A curatorial Ear: Rhythming the museum after hours with public programming. 

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¹ Commissioned as part of Insomnolence, an exhibition that explored the epistemologies and equities of sleep. More information on Radio Insomnia and the full program: https://insomnia.radio.fm/ https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/about-a-propos/

² Radio Insomnia sees sleep as recuperation against an expense of energy regardless of the time of day or night, and values sleep by regularly taking naps.

³ ‘To become a feminist ear is to hear complaints together’, Sara Ahmed, Complaint! Duke University Press, Durham, 2021, p. 6.

⁴ bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Routledge, New York, 2015.

⁵ Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, iUniverse, New York, 2005.