By Florencia Curci
To start this conversation, I asked the artist, music therapist and inventor Sebastián Rey to bring some objects from his personal archive. He brought La Fanzinoteca with him. In the following interview, we talk about his work as a fanzine editor and listening teacher for children and adults, sometimes in tumultuous social contexts.
Sebastián has conducted laboratories for sound exploration, improvisation and the assembly of handmade technological devices, as well as organising sound activism gatherings, both independently and in collaboration with institutions in South America. He is one of the coordinators of the Latin American School of Sound Art at Festival Tsonami, where he also runs workshops and laboratories with children and teachers on possible intersections between teaching practice, listening processes and sound art. In recent years, he has written and published more than a dozen fanzines focused on collective listening processes, sound devices and pedagogical practices, edited by the publisher and cultural platform Estudio Repisa.
Florencia Curci
How did the fanzinoteca (fanzine library) come about?
Sebastián Rey
The previous year, we launched the C.A.J.A. (Caja de Artefactos y Juegos Audiovisuales / Box of Artefacts and Audiovisual Games) project, whose first edition we carried out with a group of artists from Argentina. Caja is the Spanish word for box, and in this box, you can find a set of audiovisual devices and games to equip educational establishments with creative laboratories. Among the devices are a camera obscura, piezoelectric microphones, zoetropes, handmade video projectors, light boxes and oscillators. When we started to organise workshops using this box of experimental apparatus, we thought of creating a series of fanzines so the teachers at the schools where we left the devices could have some ideas on how to use them. We made them like short, homemade tutorials, hand-drawn, to include with the C.A.J.A., so people could understand how to use each device included in the box and what it’s for. One of the fanzines was called “How to trigger collective listening processes?”, another “Oscillator. How to make a sound using this thing?”, etc.
At the same time, I noticed that in Chile there was some financial support for generating editorial processes surrounding pedagogic practices, as a kind of written record of what happened. It seemed interesting to me because I had been giving workshops since 2013. More than ten years had passed, and the only record I had was photographic, maybe some recording on Sonido Cinico’s website (an artist duo with Leonello Zambon with whom we started with the listening labs) that was a bit strange and hard to navigate.
I was organising this workshop for children in Valparaiso called la ciudad de los niños / the city of the children, and the idea of making fanzines seemed like an opportunity to capture something fresh from the experience in real time, to transfer it to another surface, print it, give it away, have it for a work meeting, share it, take it to a school, use it with other teachers, put it on the web for download or online viewing, and have it on paper for a fair, to exchange, sell or whatever. Suddenly it seemed like a very interesting object. I remember that by that time I was giving a workshop on Bruno Munari, an artist whose fetish object is paper (he has many ways to make homemade books), so everything fell into place.
After this workshop, I began to shape the Latin American school of sound art, where we engaged in many activities, documented by the fanzines that comprise the fanzinoteca.
FC
Was the first workshop during the social outburst in Chile?
SR
In 2019, I was invited to conduct a workshop with children within the framework of the Tsonami Sound Art Festival (Chile), and a month before the festival started, what is called el estallido social (the social outburst) began in Chile. There were barricades in the streets and everything was on fire. I remember exchanging messages with friends who went there earlier for the pre-festival residency, and they showed me demonstrations with tonnes of cops, and people throwing Molotov cocktails, stones and everything. The outburst started in October, the residency was in November and the festival was in early December. So everything was very fresh; everything was happening. Because of everything that was going on, the festival changed its format that year and proposed groups of artists to discuss, investigate and create things in classrooms related to the outburst. Taking responsibility for what shook society also had to shake the festival. We couldn’t continue to build a museum of sound (in the sense of a cold and isolated space for the arts); we had to react, we had to do something else. The same happened with the children’s workshop I was going to facilitate. I was lucky that Sandra Marín (who runs Estudio Repisa) was also in Chile and came to help me.
The original plan for the workshop was this: the first time I went to Valparaiso, there were very nice playgrounds in the Cultural Park (a cultural space founded in the building of the former prison). But the second time I went, in 2018, the playgrounds were no longer there. It was very strange for me because in Argentina they might get broken or lack maintenance, but for someone to remove them without replacing them was something I had never seen before. Later, I found out what had happened: they were borrowed playgrounds that the Park had to buy, but they didn’t want to, and in the end, they sold them to a “sacrifice zone”. In Chile, sacrifice zones are places with the lowest life expectancy, where natural resources are exploited at the cost of the area’s and people’s health. So they took the playgrounds to the children there, which is good, but not if you take them from other children. At the time, the children of Valparaiso protested and tied themselves to the playgrounds. But there was no way; they took them anyway. My idea was to propose a kind of assembly, forum or council of children where they, as the main users of that space, could suggest what playground they would like the park to have – regardless of whether their ideas were feasible or not. For example, if someone wanted a pillow castle, that was valid. Some ideas emerged, like shoes for walking on the ceiling, which was a way to think outside the box of swings, slides or traditional playgrounds. That was the plan. It was lovely, but then the social outburst happened, and I felt that I didn’t want to go there as if nothing was happening. It felt very off to me.
FC
But how did you address the topic of the social outbursts with children?
SR
It was unavoidable; you walked into the city and encountered tear gas from the previous night. I could tell because my scalp would get irritated; there was poison in the air. You’re not used to it, and neither are the very sensitive children. How to incorporate that into the workshop without turning everything super dark, like “Tell me what’s traumatising you, kid”. Finding that balance, echoing and hosting the conflict without forcing it. I didn’t know what to do. I decided to make a fanzine with some questions from the sonic perspective (since that was our focus) to see if anyone’s response brought up something about the revolt. That would give us a starting point to talk. Share, host and elaborate on the situation, which was traumatic on the one hand because there was violence, police, detainees and people losing eyes. On the other hand, there was a beautiful part of neighbourhood organisation, assemblies, solidarity and camaraderie – all things we want for the future society. I made this first homemade fanzine called laboratorio sonoro (Sonic Laboratory), which starts by asking what their favourite food is and getting them to write their name (so they can easily take ownership of it). I drew a bit of inspiration from some exercises in Murray Schafer’s book “A Sound Education”, one of my go-to books with 100 spectacular listening exercises that seemed suitable:
“What was the first sound you heard this morning? What’s the loudest sound you’ve heard recently? (which could lead to talking about gunshots, tear gas, drums) The softest sound? The most beautiful? The most terrifying? (in case they had felt scared) Have you made sounds in a group lately? (there were cacerolazos everywhere) What sound would you like to eliminate from your environment? What sound was missing that you would like to add?”
And then to get a bit playful, I asked: “What would you tell a newly arrived alien was the best part of this month of turmoil?” (The President’s wife had audio leaked in which she told a friend that what was happening in Chile was like an alien invasion.)
„For any collective process to exist, you have to work on listening. For instance, in schools, it’s not just the music teacher who should work on listening. Listening is useful for any collective process, and in any teaching and learning process, if there’s no listening, in my opinion, that process isn’t possible, or it’s not strong or genuine.“
FC
What’s the role of playing games in the listening processes you propose?
SR
In my opinion, if we’re talking about working with children, it’s through playing games. All my workshop proposals are games. With adults, I try to do the same. The difference is that, with adults, there’s a moment that I try to have after the game (or exercise, but it’s better to call it a game) when I tie in some concepts. With children, I also try to do this, collaboratively building collective definitions or tying things together based on what they bring up, without me being the one explaining. If they ask me, I try to open it up to more questions and see how we can build collective knowledge from there: starting with play and listening, sparking curiosity and questions, and from those questions, we start exploring. I think with adults, we need to do it this way, too, because, as adults, we sometimes forget to play. Suddenly, when you play, you awaken many things, from curiosity to trying and failing, to doing something that you don’t know why you’re doing, and it liberates you from the tedious everyday routine. And then, from there, we think about building, conjecturing and forming collective knowledge.
The difference at a sound art festival between my workshop with children and the sessions with adult artists is that adults have expensive toys, which they usually don’t share, while children enthusiastically play with whatever they’re given.
That’s why I try to use simple materials. Discovering the “tentaculares” (which can be translated as “tentacledphones”, which is a playful combination of “tentacles” and “headphones”) that you invented is so important because it’s something that can fall on the ground. If it breaks, we can fix it, and we can make it at home. It doesn’t need an amplifier, a console, electricity or cables. It’s similar to the piezoelectric (in the sense of being a “listening microscope”) that I worked with for the first eight years of this research, but it solved many technical problems that might have distracted me from what I now find relevant for group work.
FC
What is the policy behind the decision to use simple materials and make devices that can be fixed?
SR
First, politicisation means that anyone can use it. You don’t need to be an expert or a sound engineer to use the expensive tools. Secondly, because it also matches the curiosity that children have to play. Sometimes these expensive technologies generate an asymmetrical, adult-centric situation in which the adult knows how to use this expensive thing and the child can only have access by respecting certain rules that are imposed on them about established ways of doing things. For me, it should be the other way around. I believe that children’s creativity has much more to teach us than the established ways in which adults do things or use objects.
So, in a way, I think these kinds of simple and inexpensive DIY devices democratise, equalise and empower children.
And, of course, there’s a policy in terms of access. By using inexpensive and common materials that can be found anywhere, we allow more people to make them. To position ourselves as producers of technologies and not mere consumers. To escape a little bit from the consumption cycle, in which you buy something expensive, it breaks, you have to buy something more expensive because you can’t fix it, etc. In that sense, these practices are emancipatory or point to possible emancipation, even if only for our artistic endeavours.
And then there’s another reading that has to do with understanding these technologies as prostheses, extensions of the human body. So if I don’t have to buy my prosthesis from Apple, but I can build and modify the extension of my body, in some way, I understand that I can modify, I can transform myself from my desires and my ideas. I believe that this tangible idea of transmutation has an incredible power, which is very different from the passive position of the consumer of technology, which especially in these latitudes, in the South, is also a power of inequality (because few people have access to it) and therefore leads to violence.
„(W)hen you play, you awaken many things, from curiosity to trying and failing, to doing something that you don’t know why you’re doing, and it liberates you from the tedious everyday routine. And then, from there, we think about building, conjecturing and forming collective knowledge.“
FC
And what are you currently interested in regarding working with groups?
SR
That question reminds me of a game we used to close each day of the workshop. It’s a game taught by Pepa Vivanco (one of my teachers), and it’s a different way of playing musical chairs. In the original version, there’s a circle of chairs where, when the music stops, all players must sit down and one player is left out because there aren’t enough chairs. The one who can’t sit loses and is out. In the next rounds, the chairs are removed one by one until only one winner is seated. So it’s always the thinnest, most agile, the fastest person who wins. The clumsier or heavier ones usually lose. The game promotes competition and exclusion. Pepa Vivanco suggests that if we teach these games to children, we promote these values for their growth. She proposes changing the game, so either everyone loses or everyone wins; no one wins alone. When the music stops, everyone has to sit down, and because one chair is missing, the person who couldn’t sit must be helped by others to sit on someone’s lap or share a piece of a chair. Another rule is that the group must keep all feet in the air for five or ten seconds (in the image, you can see me scrutinising with a stick). In the workshop, we added live music and invited parents to play, and we all had fun. This way, with new rules of the game, we promote cooperation, autonomy, teamwork and mutual care. It’s tough when the chairs are almost gone!
That’s what I find important to work on nowadays. Ways of generating structures, rules and ideas of being together more cooperatively.
FC
Would you agree that designing a game is like designing a possible world?
SR
In a way, yes. You let it go, and everything is possible. From a psychoanalytic perspective, play is how children process their anxieties, worries and what they can’t put into words. So play has a fundamental role in human development. Something very important is that, for play to exist, there must be someone watching over you because you need to be in a non-dangerous environment to play. You can’t play next to the tracks because the train might run you over. That’s why I advocate for respected, safe and protected play. Play requires someone to watch, even if they don’t actively participate but just be a witness and caretaker. Helping create a space for people to develop, be creative, autonomous and confident, so they become good people in the future. It might sound utopian, but I teach so kids can be well and grow up to be good people who improve society.
This is how I link the sonic as a political act towards societal transformation from children to adults. I want to change the world. If my role in that transformation is taking care of some kids for a while, and playing with sound, let’s do it. If it’s playing with adults and encouraging them to play with others elsewhere, let’s do it, too.
FC
Do you publish to keep a record of your work, or is there something more involved in that task?
SR
In the fanzine library, we printed this phrase (which is not mine; I read it at the Migra independent publishers’ fair): “To publish is to amplify.”
Both workshops and sound are very ephemeral, so if you’re not participating in the activity, it’s not easy to access it later. You can see an Instagram post and some photos, but I think a fanzine allows you to capture a fresh idea or impression without a predefined platform format or many intermediaries. It might not be as deep as the content you’d put in a book, but it’s fresh and urgent. Its function is to spread; if a teacher picks it up and realises they can also do it, make a listening game and a fanzine. I see it as a kind of tool for disseminating information and empowerment. I find it politically captivating: proving to myself that it’s possible to do something on your own, serving as a tool for dissemination and thinking, driving actions and circulating without many intermediaries or much time.
FC
Then the contents of your workshops and publications usually arise from the experience and the exchange with others.
SR
Absolutely. For example, in that workshop during the social uprising in Chile, when we finally got to the activity where the kids proposed games for the Cultural Park, we realised that many of the proposed games were related to water: a water roller coaster pool and things like that. About one in four games was about water. We then realised that Valparaíso is a coastal city, but you can’t swim because of the port, and in recent years due to the water crisis caused by lack of rain.
By listening to what the kids were bringing up, we came up with the idea for one of the lab sessions to focus on water: an issue they raised, which is very relevant to discuss because Chile’s water laws are particularly outdated. We built a DIY device to make the water vibrate following different sound frequencies. We also used buckets and the “tentaculares” to try to listen to the voices of the water and what stories it had to tell us. We worked on several games with the kids that resulted in a fanzine as well.
FC
Why do you choose listening as a work strategy?
SR
I like working with something invisible. I’m also interested in a dimension beyond the phenomenological, beyond what is sounding and what we can hear. I think of listening not only as perceiving sounds but also what Roland Barthes calls “intersubjective listening”. Listening means hearing each other, and perceiving that there’s another person. For me, it’s more about listening than seeing, for example. The other day, I was discussing this with a writer, and she explained that, for her, it was “reading” – reading a situation, behaviour, political stance or a personality. But I believe listening is more about recognition; it’s more about containing and being concave (whereas the eye is more convex).
There’s something in the fanzine “Daily Listening” that highlights the idea that listening is a faculty you can practice, which can improve or worsen over time. It’s a daily practice, not only marvelling at how raindrops sound on the roof, but also listening to those around you, listening to yourself, what you feel, paying attention to your partner, your nephew, your child, your cousin, your neighbour. It’s about delving into what’s there, exploring deeper and deeper. I enjoy that. It’s like a never-ending game.
For any collective process to exist, you have to work on listening. For instance, in schools, it’s not just the music teacher who should work on listening. Listening is useful for any collective process, and in any teaching and learning process, if there’s no listening, in my opinion, that process isn’t possible, or it’s not strong or genuine.
FC
Why do you think working with children is important?
SR
Mostly because I enjoy it and like it. It has a freshness that doesn’t always happen with adults. Sometimes I feel like I learn more, get more surprised and have more fun. On the other hand, I feel there’s a plasticity at that age that gets lost later. I believe that if you play, learn and work with your ears, listening to the community and the group as a child, you’ll grow up to become a cool adult. I don’t care if you become a musician or a “listenologist” or whatever. I paraphrase a quote from Gianni Rodari: “The full use of listening for everyone seems like a beautiful motto – not so that everyone becomes an artist, but so that no one becomes a slave.”
I recently asked myself why I insist so much on listening and working with children, and I concluded that I would have liked to have been listened to more when I was a child. Maybe at some point, I didn’t feel very heard. So, in a way, creating space for children’s voices is also a way to heal or repair something I didn’t have. Do you remember what the activities were at home when you were a child? Was anything besides school designed for you?
This article is brought to you by 3/4.sk as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthening the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union (EU) or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the EU nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.