Grants/Sonidero Memory: The Epics of Objects // Participative Archive Platform
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
The construction of an online participatory archive of objects related to the sonidero culture, featuring multimedia entries on technical equipment (ranging from the most basic to the latest, most powerful item; commonly intervened and transformed by the sonideros, when not entirely created out of improbable components), music objects (vinyls, cassettes and CDs that give account of a deep musical knowledge that covers the whole continent, and of the networks on which it travels), and graphical identities (the emblematic logos, posters and jackets, conveying the maximal hybridization of identities at a visual level).
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
The project will result in an online, participatory archive of objects related to the sonidero culture of Mexico and the US (though we’re hoping other countries with cumbia-related movements will join in later), initially organized among three main fields:
- Technical equipment: sound and lightning equipment. - Music: vynils, cassettes and CDs. - Graphical identities: logos, posters, jackets.
The entries will consist of photos and video, texts and links with information, interviews, and chronicles related to the particular object. EPS will launch the archive with the production of 18 multimedia entries (6 for each field), exploring the possibilities of the format and the content, and opening the archive to subsequent collective construction.
Material produced during the project and not utilized for the memory archive, will be added to the open photo and video archives that the website will offer as a source of material for sonideros and their fans; musicians; promoters and programmers; anthropologists; ethnomusicologists; lawyers with expertise in copyright alternatives; amateur and professional photographers and filmmakers; visual and digital artists; writers and journalists.
The memory archive will be launched with a 3 days workshop for the sonidero community, to be held at Mexico City’s Casa Talavera, a cultural center in La Merced area. Marco Ramírez, Livia Radwanski and Mariana Delgado will share the theoretical and technical tools we resorted to for the archive, offering our takes on memory and heritage, photo and video techniques, web platforms and networks. A guide to the workshop’s topics and DIY manuals will be available online.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
“Sonidos” is the name given to soundsystems in Mexico. Originating in the inner-city neighborhoods of Mexico City around fifty years ago, sonidos are summoned to liven up parties, weddings, baptisms and religious celebrations with vibrant cumbias and salsas. “Sonidero” is the name given to the owner of the sound system, who also performs as MC and DJ, providing his audience not only with select music from all over the continent, but also with the opportunity to participate, shouting out dedications to friends, family and neighbors, whether present or absent. Today, the sonidero movement has an extended influence within Mexico, and has successfully crossed over to the United States, where it’s championed by migrants, and not only Mexicans. Its circuit does also cover the music circuit of Central and South America, where for fifty years the sonideros have sought the tunes that nurture the movement. Furthermore, it has effectively taken over the world wide web, where its culture of salutation and remix has found a fertile ground, connecting networks and experiences.
Despite the odds, it is an vibrant scene, a vast network and a powerful market where thousands of sonideros compete (there is no census, but local sonideros all agree in 10,000 as the number of sonidos in Mexico City’s metropolitan area alone). The odds are the relationship with the authorities, who see in its street disposition and its “noise” a danger to the order and act accordingly to suppress rather than control it; and the non-existing relation to the mainstream media, which had been indifferent to the movement until now.
The collaboration between El Proyecto Sonidero and the sonidero community relies on the common purpose of seeking legitimacy and visibility for manifestations of cultural diversity; in opening the baile and the buzz to the discussion of city and neighbors, public space and public sphere, community and commons, knowledge, business models, heritage and future. It is following this line of collaboration that we came to plan the participatory archive as a project core to the website.
Sonideros take great pride of the objects that conform the material culture of the movement, as they are concrete testimony to the tenacity of their travels in geographical, cultural and technological territories; of their gift for invention and combination; of their personal investment and resilience; of the community bounds.
For the sonidero community and for EPS, completing this effort it means being able to translate to the digital sphere past and present offline conversations and collaborations, and sharing with a broader audience the stories and practices, experiences and expertise of the movement through its objects.br />
El Proyecto Sonidero (EPS) began in 2008 with the aim of recognizing the potency of the sonidero movement as a creative response to a set of cultural, economical and social needs, acting as a transnational/transcultural platform for expression, innovation, mediation, participation and communication for broad sectors of Mexican society. This is the territory explored by our work with the sonidero community, the cultural spaces, and the artistic and academic fields. EPS is a collective that brings together anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, producers, photographers, documentary filmmakers and artists from Mexico, the US, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.
We perform investigations, multimedia recordings, exhibitions and events. We welcome collaborations; we value conversations over all else. Until now, all the activities we’ve set in motion have yielded juicy fruits thanks to the support of the sonidero community and our collaborating institutions. We’ve taken encouragement from the response of the public, the internauts and the media.
EPS has as its antecedent the Programa Comunidades Transnacionales which formed part of the Festival Internacional de Artes Electrónicas y Video Transitio 2007 and which was dedicated to digital communities emerging at the intersection of axiomatic global phenomena: technological revolutions and demographic changes. The emphasis was on migrant communities who utilize technological and conceptual tools available on the Internet to develop artistic and cultural projects that broaden the channels of community interaction between Mexico and the United States.
1) Programming of events: In 2000 and 2010, EPS produced a series performances, exhibitions, roundtables, multimedia presentations and workshops for the following cultural, artistic and academic forums: Centro Cultural de España en México Festival de México en el Centro Histórico Festival Barroquísimo de Puebla Fábrica de Artes y Oficios Faro de Tláhuac Encuentro Internacional de Artistas Prisma at Cenart Festival de Arte Contemporáneo de León Teorías del Caos at La Miscelánea Centro de Arte Voces Híbridas / Homage to Néstor García Canclini Society of Ethnomusicology/ Annual Conference Festival de Cine Ambulante
In 2010, we look forward to taking part in: Festival de Oaxaca / Expoferia Huajuapan Exposición/Presentación del Programa de Apoyo of Centro Multimedia at Cenart Barcelona Culture Forum FCF
2) Research: Since its start, EPS has been keen on producing formal knowledge around the sonidero experience; in 2009, Marco Ramírez, Catherine Ragland and Mariana Delgado produced three essays for the Programa de Apoyo a la Investigación en Arte y Medios, run by the Centro Multimedia of Centro Nacional de las Artes. The essays, soon to be published, were dedicated to diasporic public spheres (Ragland), informal education and intangible heritage (Ramírez) and network operations and socio-cultural developments of technology (Delgado).
3) Production of a photo and video archives: Recordings generated by EPS amount to over 5,000 photos and 28 hours of video, covering 28 sonidero events during a period of 20 months.
4) Consultancy: In 2009 and following the success of the events it produced, EPS’s help was requested by three cultural TV shows (“Tocando Tierra” for Canal 22/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes; “Barra Infantil” and “Omnibus” for Canal 11/ Instituto Politécnico Nacional) who were interested in the sonidero movement.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The project can be evaluated by the participation of the sonideros in the construction of the archive and in spreading the word about it; involvement of sonideros and exchange with its organizations and media platforms have always been key to the project’s capacity.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
The project will involve a team of 8 people to launch the platform, covering general coordination, photo/video recording and editing, workshop coordination, consultancy, design and programming). Four members of the team are core to EPS collective activities (Mariana Delgado, co-director and founder; Marco Ramírez, co-director nd founder; Livia Radwanski, photographer; Marisol Mendoza, sonidera), and the other three will offer specific collaborations.
As for online participants, our blog has been receiving between 8,000 and 10,000 visitors a month for a year now, and we can expect that some of them will join the effort, as it responds to constant requests of collaboration paths that we receive from our visitors. We also count on promoting the archive via affiliated sonidero sites, US and Mexico based (www.ondasonidera.com, www.sonideros2000.com, www.carmenjarasonideros.com , and www.audimix.com) and on the slow but constant increase of the entries.
Regarding the sustainability of their participation in the construction of the archive, it is directly linked to the success of the website in keeping up both with the community's needs and flows and to the project's outreach.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
Sonideros provide their audiences with a public space of diversity for the recreation of the community, to be enjoyed by entire families, youth and elder, homo and heterosexuals.
They are a source of work that acts a network of sonidos, assistants, technicians, equipment manufacturers, formal and informal music labels, music dealers, musicians and dancers, video recording ventures, distributors, promoters, dance halls, marketing enterprises, websites, and street vendors.
Sonidos offer informal education to its members, who acquire practical knowledge in fields ranging from carpentry to design and programming, and expert knowledge on popular music and its circuits throughout the American continent.
They represent a massive channel for community interaction, that helps connect and strengthen the links of Mexican communities spread across Puebla and New York, Oaxaca and California, Michoacan and Illinois, to name only a few migratory binomials.
The reference to the fields of action of the sonidero community intends to illustrate the wide array of issues that they can bring forth to the public conversation about the emergence cultural systems and cultural industries and the development of technological and economical alternatives. It draws inspiration from Ronaldo Lemos and Oona Castro’s technobrega study to approach a similar yet wider phenomenon with the pursue of understanding it and furthermore, of sharing that understanding at the level of experience, which is at the basis of the commons.
Licensed under CC since its start, EPS has been injecting the public sphere and the public domain as well with the concrete results of its work, whether events or photographs and videos or research results; we’re currently working together with Ediciones Tumbona on the edition of a collaborative, free e- book that will gather perspectives from social sciences, journalism, literature, visual arts and digital humanities.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
Having operated with a blog for a little more than a year, which was very successful (around 140,000 visitors and 500 comments) and very limited at the same time, EPS is moving forward to launch a website. Currently in beta state, the website is intended to work as a net and an archive; articulated around the sonideros’ online and offline work, the platform is to feature collaborations from diverse actors sonideros and their fans; musicians; promoters and programmers; anthropologists; ethnomusicologists; lawyers with expertise in copyright alternatives; amateur and professional photographers and filmmakers; visual and digital artists; writers and journalists. It will also encourage the participation of analogous movements from Latin America: technobrega in Brazil, picoteros in Colombia, cumbia villera in Argentina.
It is to grow by phases: the initial platform will feature an archive of previous materials produced by EPS, an events calendar, a feedback tool, the blog and an online souvenir shop. We expect to add in the future a forum; a wiki; a directory of sonideros, organizations and services; a section for e-publications.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
Our expertise fully covers the research aspects, the production of events and the production and edition of multimedia material. However, and despite our understanding of its theoretical aspects, the weakest flank of EPS are its Internet operations. There’s a basic reason for that: the collective does not currently count on a programmer/designer to develop together the adequate, open source tools, and relies on the services of webmasters. So the main challenge we face is being able to balance the volume of our online and off-line productions; that is, to be able to fully operate, circulate and connect in the www territories.
This application is an attempt to overcome these limitations; if we succeed we will be able to pursue a project we consider most valuable for our www development, and we will be able to do so with the most valuable support, too.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
The future website is meant also as an investment in the auto- sustainability of EPS by means of its online store. As the first enterprise of its kind, sonideros and EPS will offer jackets, t-shirts, posters and postcards, important memorabilia that is sought by fans of the movement on both sides of the border, and beyond the equator too. Each sonidero/brand will be able to sell its products at the prize it considers best, and in accordance with adding to it a 15% commission and shipping costs.
Another steady source of EPS’s income is the production of events (performances, exhibitions, rountables and workshops) in collaboration with cultural institutions, which we plan to gradually broaden both to non institutional spaces and international levels.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
It will always be possible to trace the usefulness of the project by the degree of appropriation of the tools not only by the users taking part in the construction of the archive, but also by other websites, either linking to the project or adding its version to their own memory toolkits.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
Technical advice and support, most important, helping us find the adequate platform to operate the archive. We do also look forward to the feedback on legal aspects of our work, and to taking part in a major and diverse effort to democratize access to distribution, consumption and enjoyment of culture.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
Our work takes place in an intersection of arts/culture, research and sonidero worlds, drawing online and offline strategies and tactis from each one of them, adapting to the circumstances and trying to bridge the differences. From the start, this has been a major challenge for EPS, and we have tried to keep as many communication paths open while not losing the project’s scope.
- EPS collective, research collaborators and international partners: through e-mail updates, skype conversations, piratepad work sessions, general and specific meetings at the project’s headquarters in Mexico City. - Sonidero collaborators: phone and cellphone calls, e-mails back, but mostly meetings throughout the city, attendance to organizations’ reunions, bailes and community events. - Sonidero community: attendance to the events, exchange of messages and posts in myspaces, websites, blogs. - Institutional partnerships: following the usual paths.
Legal
Yes
