Text: Kika Echeverría
Originally published on 3/4.sk
“(N)oise can be part of the massiveness (protesters) but also can be co-opted by institutional control and police repression“
It was before 18 October 2019, when I used to walk 30 minutes to my job and 30 minutes back to my home. 18 October 2019 was a Friday. Since Monday and throughout the week, I walked around observing many of the entrances to metro stations that were closed due to protests by high-school students. The reason was the increase in the cost of public transport in Santiago by 30 Chilean pesos1. The students called for a mass boycott of the payment as a form of protest. The call lasted five days, with the police repressing the protestors. The situation escalated until that Friday, when certain metro stations in Santiago were shut down because of the mass boycott, obliging people to walk from their jobs to their homes. That day, I had my everyday 30-minute walk with an ocean of people. As we were so many, we couldn’t even walk on the sidewalk. We occupied the streets, while the cars and some buses were stuck with no way to continue their journey. The people were angry, tired and frustrated, calculating how much time would they need to walk to arrive safely at home.
Santiago was on fire and crowds of people were demonstrating on the streets. Barricades were erected, and the police resorted to repressive measures with tear gas and “el guanaco” (the colloquial name for water cannons deployed by the police). There were also plenty of sirens, people looting stores, more barricades, people chanting out loud against the situation, confused people and people running from the police, while buses were set on fire and other people caceroleando2. That was the beginning of what came to be known as the “Estallido Social”3, which spread throughout the cities of Chile, demonstrating that injustice and inequality were an issue up and down the country.
The city was full of noise
A revision of the sonic dimension of the Estallido Social immediately highlights the importance of cacerolazos as they were the first response to the curfew decreed by the President at that time, Sebastián Piñera. This action evoked the sensory and emotional memories of Chileans, transporting them back to the most critical and painful moments of Pinochet’s dictatorship4 (Bieletto-Bueno and Spencer 2020). During those five months of the Estallido Social, political chants could also be heard on the streets, but one of them was especially important as it was the common declaration of this period: “Chile despertó” (Chile woke up), embracing the idea that the people were finally awake, fighting for their rights in the country where neoliberalism was born. There was common ground where the screams and chanting of “Chile despertó” were full of joy and a prominent feature at the time, supported by drums and even trumpets that filled the public space.
There was also an important recovery of musical repertoires of resistance from decades ago: on one hand, “Los Prisioneros” and their music confronting the dictatorship at the end of the 1980s and, on the other, music from “Nueva Canción Chilena” and “Canto Nuevo”5, showing how their lyrics still had currency, despite the fact that more than 30 years had passed since the dictatorship ended. This repertoire is deeply rooted in the people of Chile and their protest music tradition, building a sense of belonging among all the people who were demonstrating in the streets. The sounds of the movement – music, chants, slogans, shouts, cries and laughter – made the Chileans vibrate together, bringing to life a wealth of buried memories and emotions. More importantly, it was a collective experience that allowed us to reclaim the cities, transforming the streets and walls into spaces to be shared, despite the conflicts and negotiations that were under way (Bieletto-Bueno and Spencer 2020).
In the face of repressive measures by the government, there is noise. According to Attali (2009), noise is a tool that “makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organisation, of a new code in another network”. Hence, noise was positioned as a political weapon capable of making sense and of creating new meanings for those who were protesting against inequality and injustice in Chile. From there, the dispute over the public space was settled – both sound and visual noise. In the visual case6, the walls of the public space were covered with drawings, phrases, murals and more demonstrations containing people’s feelings and their creative apogee. In the sonic realm, there was a constant atmosphere where the rhythm of cacerolazos managed to spread in the public space and multiplied with other sonorous actions such as shouts, chants and blows to the metal walls that began to appear as armour for the buildings, as well as blows to public furniture(Domingo Gómez and Méndez Rubio 2023). We were a social body in protest characterised by its amorphous and visceral massiveness (Vergara Vidal 2021), which was making sounds that were incompressible for the collective actors (the government, politicians and the police), as they destabilised the harmonic order prevailing over the last 30 years in Chile. We were a massive sonic agent, even defined by the collective actors as a monstrous otherness, as something to be afraid of, as an enemy, a monster, a demon (Vergara Vidal 2021).
What are the sounds of a monstrous otherness if not noise? Understanding this from Attali’s perspective is of great help in unveiling the lack and inability to listen on the part of the collective actors during the Estallido Social. Noise only exists “in relation to the system within it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver”, and in that scenario “to make noise is to interrupt a transmission”, which means to kill the old order. Some could say that the collective actors managed to propose the Agreement for Peace and the New Constitution7 in response to the demands. However, after five years, the demands pointed out by the mass actors (the protesters) on a wide scale have not been dispelled.
As the collective actors sought to silence the protests, the sounds of the Estallido Social were not only cacerolazos, shouts and chants, but also repression. There was a constant state of alertness as if the soundscape was an alarm itself, especially when the chants and cacerolazos were blurred by rubber bullets and sirens (Echeverría 2020). In that sense, the Estallido Social was not only about communal experience in the public space, the political struggle and the demonstrations, but also about human rights violations, a constant violence coming from the police and the State of Chile. Having said this, the Estallido Social is also remembered because of the considerable number of victims of ocular trauma8, people tortured and those killed. To this day, there is still impunity and a lack of integral reparation for the victims9.
An important act of repression took place that is urgent to consider today. This not only concerns the utopic point of view of noise, but also the sound of repression10 and how, in the end, that repression looked to silence noise. This makes me think about the uses of noise in the context of a sociopolitical crisis, considering that noise can be part of the massiveness (protesters) but also can be co-opted by institutional control and police repression. One destabilises the other. One seeks to be listened to, and the other looks to silence.
I would like to reflect on the noises that are looking to be listened to and understand themselves from their creative potentiality, to imagine other realities – new realities, and better realities – and build them from the acoustic realm.
Co-listening to noise
I constantly listened to the noises of the protests while I was living next to the place where they took place in Santiago. It was a five-month soundscape, full of timbres, rumbles, sirens, cacerolazos, chants, shouts, rubber bullets, barricades and tear gas, bursting into the city’s atmosphere we were used to listening to. What struck me about this amorphous and visceral massiveness was the variety of sounds emitted and how they were changing according to the events happening in Chile. The noises from the protestors were a way to notify the vibe among people and how much of the public space was occupied by them. These noises were expressing communal feelings that were kept inside our bodies: from angry shouts against the police and the President of the time, chants of opposing football clubs – which during the Estallido Social overcame their quarrels11 – as well as massive chants from feminists12, besides festive and joyful sounds of unity from those who were part of this massive body, among many other sounds. While at home, all this took me to the street, literally moving me to the centre of the protests and shouting. All these noises were resonating throughout the country.
Sound has the capacity to set bodies and things in motion by extending their reach, shifting our perceptual frame from its source toward an evanescent becoming (LaBelle 2018). Therefore, the act of listening can be defined in different ways, depending on where the focus is, the purpose behind it and who is listening. The auditory situation and the disposition of the self are crucial since listening is context-dependent, whereas the subjective and intersubjective dimensions play a role in the perception and understanding of the sounds that are being heard. In this respect, co-listening (Chattopadhyay 2023) serves as a concept that considers these dimensions, defined as an act that “meditates on the convivial resonances a listener feels when listening at a social setting shared with other human and non-human inhabitants/occupants”. It is a form of decentred listening, also understood as an act of resistance where the reciprocity and the inter-subjective are central, helping to build communities. That said, co-listening has an immanent political dimension, from the moment it takes care of the listening situations as well as the positionality of who is listening.
Following Chattopadhyay – and according to Attali’s definition – noise is the song of the oppressed, from the moment it goes beyond the limits and pushes the boundaries of our listening practices, exceeding the codes and provoking the structures of what we are used to listening to. As regards the potentiality for noise creation, co-listening practices were capable of interweaving meeting points between the subjectivities of the massive monstrosity of Estallido Social. It invited more people to participate in the protests to make the strongest noise possible, in order to be heard, to call for the creation of other ways of living and relate with each other, with unknown people in the street, and with the neighbours we haven’t met before. We sought to be listened to, but these noises still haven’t been listened to. They have been silenced.
I don’t expect the institutions and the collective group to be able to co-listen. Considering that noise is about power and its dispute, I expect that the oppressed co-listens. This makes space for the creative potentiality of noise that I mentioned above, one that can only be interlaced with the evocative capacity of sound. But what is the point of co-listening to the noises of the Estallido Social if it has already happened? What is the point of revisiting that sonorous moment in Chile’s history?
The exercise of memory is anchored in the present, understood as a performative act that actively and collectively constructs how we elaborate and understand the past (and speculate on the future); hence, memories are multiple and mutate. As an action of the present, “memories cannot be separated from space either. They always refer to a social reality that involves various kinds of situated relationships” (Salinero 2022). With this in mind, co-listening acquires more sense from the moment that is defined as socially decentred listening (Chattopadhyay 2023), presenting a more open, self-critical and dialogic listening than the conventional form of listening; a listening situation willing and able to understand the social functionality of noise.
From noise to sound archives
At the time of the Estallido Social, I listened to all of these noises every day. To be able to experience that in my daily life was an impressive exercise that urged me to record it as a matter of proof, as a piece of evidence to keep for the future. I was concerned about how this massiveness was going to be remembered, hoping that at some point these noises would be listened to with attention and enough sensitivity. My sound recorder became my ally, an extension of my listening body, a witness.
The ephemeral and intangible aspect of sound is something that makes phonographic recording crucial in this regard. The possibility of recording sounds signifies our technological power to crystalise the ephemeral. Since its origins, the phonographic practice has been defined as a tool of power that was born to preserve hegemonic discourses, stockpile memory and manipulate information, as a means of social control (Attali 2009). They also altered the performative aesthetics by limiting the duration and scope of improvisation (Chattopadhyay 2021). The phonograph record installed a strategic usage of music by repetition, whereas the harmonies of the world were conceived in a specific way, which implies silencing the composition that might arise from different bodies and groups, silencing the noises that might emerge.
Notwithstanding the above, the methodology and the purpose behind sound recording can also contribute to understanding power structures within society with its ability to crystallise a sonorous moment. That is possible only if we highlight the relevance of how to listen to sound archives, understanding them not only as a simple apparatus that registers something, but also as an element that can help us to understand realities.
Sound archives today can be conceived not only “to preserve” and “to document”, but also to agitate a process of “reordering the senses” (Samuels, et al. 2010) or a “redistribution of the sensible” (Rancière). They have a processual, unstable and unfinished nature and are manipulable, as a generator of instability (García 2021), especially in the realm of the use of technologies and their openness in the 21st century with the deinstitutionalisation of archival practices that host new forms of archiving (Ochoa Gautier 2017). They make space for the poetics of the archive, whereas, in Derridá’s terms, they look to record the past, bring it to the present and project it into the future. Sound recordings are therefore in an “archival situation” insofar as the information that they store is always expanding.
Understanding sound archives from their unfinished character is in tune with the creative impulse of noise, relying on instances of listening, where the emotion and sensitivity of the listener among other elements can add, discard, reinterpret, reconstruct or destroy what has been listened to (García 2021). In this regard, it is fundamental to understand sound recording as a technique that is not simply the apparatus registering something, but also the subject who has registered the sounds, the mixture, the environment and the auditor, their experience and who they are (Osorio 2023).
As an exercise, I have listened to a number of recordings from the Estallido Social with different people. Some were Chileans, others were from other Latin American countries and just a few were from the so-called countries of the West. Their engagement was slightly different as they always showed a certain fascination with what was being listened to. In the case of Chilean listeners, most of them have recourse to their memories of the Estallido Social, sharing personal stories that were evoked from the listening exercise. When other Latin American people listen to the recordings, they also invoke their experiences with protesting, looking for common ground to think about the sonic dimensions of protests and how there is a feeling of belonging. The rest of the listeners were most surprised at how polyphonic these noises were, noticing the space that the protests gave to diverse voices and ways to express themselves to the people. In a transversal way, the euphoria was something that stood out mostly because of the feeling of hope and the possibility of dreaming about another reality, about another way of living. These listening situations resonate with my experience of listening to the recordings of the Estallido Social, where I felt more and more surprised by how dreamlike they feel. I don’t know how, but there is some hope. I laugh and embrace the possibility of creating other ways of being and living in the contemporary world.
At the same time, being able to revisit such sound recordings makes it possible to review the wounds inflicted at that time, as well as contributing to the exercise of memory and not forgetting what happened. To not make it invisible, nor silent, to not allow it to disappear. To encounter different experiences, to serve as a tool for orientation in physical or symbolic spaces and to gather a set of experiences. To co-listen and make the noises resonate. That’s how sound recordings can serve as a tool for exercising memory and evoking a multiplicity of narratives around social and cultural phenomena, especially because of the capacity of sound to evoke through listening willingly to associative imagery, fantasies and projections. If we focus on a co-listening practice and the meanings that can emerge from it, we could think of sound archives that contribute to communities remembering and composing new sonorities and/or narratives about the world. “By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men [beings] and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have” (Attali 2009), especially today when it seems that the people gained nothing after the Estallido Social. With that in mind, recording practices (and the subsequent creation of sound archives) during the Estallido Social were a way to not forget.
Sound (noise) archives are places of memory
Sound is an element that exists “as a network that teaches how to belong, to drift, to figure acts of dislocations, and to dwell within experiences of rupture” (LaBelle 2019). From this standpoint, it makes sense to reflect on the Estallido Social and its sonic dimensions from Attali’s concept of noise, as well as Chattopadhyay’s co-listening practices. This is inevitably bound up with the exercise of sound memories, comprehending it as an act that forges a potential portal to remembrance, which values creativity and calls for us to listen to the disruptive amorphous massiveness that emerged from the noises made by the people.
Sound memories are a phenomenal experiential complex with the capacity to construct cultural knowledge and give meaning to the past, the present and the future, delving into the acoustic properties of sound as well as sensory experiences. Exercising sound memories implies a subject that performs their sonorous biography and from their subjectivity constructs significant aspects of the collective memory, establishing relations between spaces, places, people, presences, absences, times, situations, acts, impositions and small acts of survival, among other elements (Polti 2014). Hence, co-listening plays a crucial role that engages with the evocative potential of sound, highlighting the reordering of the senses and redistribution of the sensitivity that sound (noise) archives can bring.
Memory opposes history by embracing polyphony and unfinished stories – always open, malleable and available for reinterpretation. This aligns with the processual, unstable and unfinished nature of sound archives, viewed from a contemporary perspective and facilitated by modern recording technologies. History, which aims to present a single, official truth, often threatens memory. Thus, there is an inevitable connection between memory, noise and sound archives. Through co-listening to sound archives, diverse events can be referenced, creating places of memory (Nora 2008). These places of memory are remnants, constantly open to expanding meanings. They evoke, are indeterminate, and in them, everything counts, symbolises and signifies (Nora 2008). That said, co-listening to sound archives means listening to noises, the sounds of the oppressed, the sounds that were not acknowledged at the time they were recorded.
I propose that these sound (noise) archives be understood as places of memory, as remnants that remind us of the creative power of noise, thus inspiring the creation of new noises against hegemony. Co-listening to sound (noise) archives as places of memory implies recognising noise as a weapon, where reciprocity and intersubjectivity prevail. It encourages political commitments to imagine and reshape the world from the sonic realm, giving us hope and a sense of belonging. Let’s keep noise for the sake of dignity.
Selection of sound (noise) archives from the Estallido Social
Audiomapa Vol. IV | Todo Estallido es un Estruendo
Radio Pasajes, “Sonidos de la Revuelta. Represión”
Radio Pasajes, “Sonidos de la Revuelta. Protesta“
Radio Pasajes, “Sonidos de la Revuelta. Espacio Público”
Footnotes
1. At that time, public transport had different prices, depending on the time and method of travel (bus only, or if it included the use of the metro), with a validity of two hours. During rush hour and using the metro, the fare was 830 CLP per trip. If a worker travelled back and forth from home to work from Monday to Friday, during rush hour and using the metro, their monthly transport expenditure was 33,200 CLP. With the increase of 30 CLP per trip, the monthly expenditure amounted to 34,400 CLP. The minimum wage at that time was 301,000 CLP. In other words, spending on public transport corresponded to more than 10% of minimum monthly income.
2. “Cacerolear”is a verb denoting the action of hitting a pot or a pan (cacerolas = casseroles) to protest. “Cacerolazos” has been established as a widely recognised form of protest in Chile, which has not belonged exclusively to one political movement to date. Its origins date back to the Modern Age as a ritual of communal justice. It was later found in France, during the Restoration, defined as a political rite that preserves the ritual form of making noises with homemade and dissonant instruments, gathering around the house of an “accused”, uttering insults, shouts and songs during the night. Chile was one of the first countries in Latin America to appropriate this form of protest. Cacerolazos can also be found in other countries, such as Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras, Canada, Iceland and Spain. To find out more about cacerolazos, I recommend „La olla y su rol en las demandas sociales en Chile (1947-2019) by Amalia Castro San Carlos (2023).
3. “Estallido Social” is the most extended name for the crisis that occurred in Chile on 18 October 2019. It translates as “social outburst”, but can also be translated as “social outrage” or “social uprising”. There are other ways to refer to this crisis, such as “Revuelta Social” (Social Revolt), or “Chile despertó” (Chile woke up), which was one of the famous protest chants on the streets.
4. It is important to consider that, at that time and since the dictatorship, Chile has not had curfews due to political reasons. So this announcement was seen as an action seeking to censor and repress the protests that were taking place.
5. “Nueva Canción Chilena” and “Canto Nuevo” are influential Chilean music movements blending folk traditions with social and political activism. Emerging in the 1960s, Nueva Canción Chilena featured artists like Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún, among others, who emphasised social justice and cultural identity. The movement gained prominence during Salvador Allende’s presidency, advocating for the marginalised.
6. As a valuable example, I recommend checking out La Ciudad Como Texto (The City as text) by Carola Ureta Marin. The project’s aim was “to capture the memory engraved on the walls of the street that was the main protagonist of the demonstrations”. https://www.laciudadcomotexto.cl/
7. The Agreement for Peace and a New Constitution, signed on 15 November 2019, marked a response from congressional leaders to widespread protests calling for systemic change. It initiated a process to draft a new constitution, replacing the one from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Despite this effort, two constituent processes ultimately failed to change the existing constitution, highlighting the challenges in achieving a broad consensus for reform.
8. During the Estallido Social, the police used a great deal of violence and different devices to heavily repress the protestors – from tear gas to police water cannons spraying chemicals, as well as pepper spray, irregular detentions and rubber bullets. It was a period when the police exceeded their powers and when they abused these different dispositive. According to the INDH (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos), there were 3777 victims during the Estallido Social, of whom 220 people suffered some kind of ocular trauma, 50 people suffered burst eyes, 82 victims lost their sight and 88 protestors suffered some kind of injury caused by eye trauma (440 total). What was the reason for this? The police did not follow protocols for the dispersal of protesters, and they shot at the level of people’s heads, something that seriously called into question the police’s actions and abuse of power. To find out more, please visit the „Map of human rights violations“ by the INDH (in Spanish), and check out this paper (in English).
9. To find out more about this, I recommend visiting the website of Coordinadora de Víctimas con Trauma Ocular (Coordinator of Victims with Ocular Trauma), where there is a book providing more information about their stories and how their lives changed after this state violence. One of the testimonies says the following:
“There are days when there is hope, where there is strength to fight for a better country, one where there is justice, equity and a dignified life. There is momentum to demand our own reparations, to stand up and face those who consider us a dangerous enemy. But there are other days when the damage, trauma and abandonment are more powerful. How can we resist in the face of a country that has violated us in so many ways? A country that began by denying us the basic rights we all need, that continued to physically attack us for demanding those rights and, today, re-victimises us and treats us as criminals. We have not only lost our sight and eyesight. We have lost our emotional stability, jobs, money, studies, relationships, sense of security and, many times, hope.”
10. There were even cases in which the police used acoustic guns to control the social order (Domingo Gómez and Méndez Rubio 2023).
11. During Chile’s Estallido Social, the long-standing rivalry between Colo-Colo and Universidad de Chile fans took an unexpected turn as fans from both sides united in solidarity. Despite their historical differences, supporters from both of these clubs came together in the protests, recognising that the social and political issues at stake transcended their sports rivalry. The Estallido Social provided a rare moment when this deeply rooted football rivalry was set aside in favour of a common cause, highlighting the potential of unity in times of national crisis.
12. The performance “Un Violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your path), created by the LasTesis collective, became a powerful symbol during the Estallido Social in Chile, with its content resonating deeply across the country and beyond. The performance was enacted countless times in various public spaces, drawing attention to systemic violence against women and the failings of the state to protect them. It transcended borders, sparking similar performances globally, from Latin America to Europe and beyond, demonstrating how the local struggle against gender violence in Chile resonated with a global audience, transforming the movement into a universal call for justice. To find out more, please watch this video.
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