An evening of sound in response to absence.

Join us for a powerful sound performance featuring a lineup of experimental sound artists responding to Soledad Fátima Muñoz’s solo exhibition, We’re Not All Here / No Estamos Todes. Through live sonic interventions, sound artists engage with themes of political erasure, memory, and resistance, amplifying the silent traumas left in the wake of state-sanctioned violence and civil neglect.

As Muñoz’s work confronts the haunting reality of those lost to authoritarian regimes and forces beyond visibility, these performances give form to what resists disappearance: sound as echo, archive, and act of defiance.

Let the frequencies speak where words have been silenced.

Let what vanishes be heard.

RSVP: go.uic.edu/DisappearingActs

MEET THE PERFORMERS:

Regina Martinez experiences sound as records of our connections and departures. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, the flap of our clothes outside on the line, the creak of the front gate to home. Each moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition, and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again.

Often under the alias, selective listening, her work evolves through vinyl DJ sets, live performance and sound design for film and movement. She’s part of the family at 606 Records. She produces the radio show alluvia’s fluid for Chicago Public Media Institute’s Lumpen Radio.

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Jared broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah’s description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history, and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, performance, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. They have presented work at IIT, School of Art at the University of Manitoba, Graham Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Southside Community Art Center, Poetry Foundation, SmartBar, Roman Susan, Steppenwolf Theater and the Hyde Park Art Center. They have published writing in Sixty Inches from Center, CULT CLASSIC Magazine, the Chicago Reader, Press Press, and Tru Laurels. Jared Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

A.J. McClenon is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice moves through text, repurposed materials, moving and still images, performance, and sound. A.J.’s work is driven by familial and collective grief, water, Blackness, geomorphology, and the global future. Drawing from physics, psychology, and visual and sonic languages A.J. explores how time, ecology, and the decentering of humanness overlap. and examines the earth as a living archive and sonic instrument. A.J. has shown work and performed at places like MCA Chicago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. A.J. is currently an Assistant Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and does teen programming at Columbus Park in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago.

Carissa Lee is obsessed with the visceral across all mediums of her work (performance, sound, public intervention, workshops, video, and theater). Her work is rooted in Black exhalation—the breath between grief and jubilation, isolation, and communion. Her work builds a home she is still searching for, using recordings, writing, and Black southern culture, including its medical histories, stories, and music, to materialize emotions and invite collective reflection.

Interested in the science of spirit, she tests hypotheses with audiences, transforming the dynamic between performer and viewer into one of shared participation and discovery. Her work explores the emotional landscape and tensions of global anti-Blackness by researching the known—personal experience, Black vernaculars, and cultural memory—to illuminate the unknown. She is captivated with the mundane, finding meaning in everyday acts: washing clothes, walking, breathing, quiet listening, watching waves, and uncovering the mythologies woven into Black southern life.

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Tags: A.J. McClenon, Carissa Lee, Chicago, CHICAGO JUSTICE GALLERY, Disappearing Acts: A Sonic Response, Jared Brown, near west side, Regina Martinez, Soledad Fatima Muñoz, UIC, We're Not All Here / No Estamos Todes