Sound of Segregation

Eric Ellingsen, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, John Baugh, Casey O’Callaghan, Neo Muyanga

^{“Toolshed” and Public “Walkshops” at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, summer 2019}

If, as legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs asserts, healthy cities need eyes on the street, then healthy cities need ears on the street too.

The SOUND OF SEGREGATION (SOS) is a community engagement tool for hearing what segregation sounds like, and a toolshed for responding to those sounds with new sound environments. Each of the partners, sub-partners and participants carries their own different disciplinary and experiential tools to the toolshed. Hammers can be tuning forks; not everything is a nail to a hammer.

Phase I of this project opens with The Tool Shed. From May 17 through August 18, 2019, the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) hosts The Tool Shed inside the courtyard. During the summer, three public Walkshops will take place. The “walkshops” are protocols of listening, where participants co-produce sound self-portraits.

THE SOUND OF SEGREGATION will also co-produce an anarchive – a ‘repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events’ (Senselab). The sound and unsound artifacts are co-curated to act as points of critical reference for the Phase II & III. These sound environments are sculptures that engage, alter, and assist the apperception of architectural divisions (partitions, walls) and urban landscapes (gerrymandering of ward boundaries) that are historically conditioned and politically reasserted by segregation.

THE SOUND OF SEGREGATION is a proof-of-concept that the Design Humanities are responsive, equitable tools for flexing civic muscles. As a civic muscle, this project emerges as contemporary art at the convergence of community engagement and pedagogy that learns how to hear-out for each other, not just look-out for each other, in the global context of division today.

More Information on the Tool Shed exhibit:

Phase 1 of the Sound of Segregation project, “Eric Ellingsen: Tool Shed,” is a fascinating, participatory, summer-long project at CAM from May 17 through August 18. Tool Shed aligns with the investigative nature of Ellingsen’s overall practice as artist, landscape architect, and assistant professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Artists will lead three “walkshops” of neighborhoods surrounding CAM in June and July, during which participants collect field recordings. These will be gathered, archived, mixed into soundscapes, and made available to listeners in an acoustically designed tool shed placed in the CAM courtyard.

Eric Ellingsen is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture in Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Wassan Al-Khudhairi is Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
John Baugh is a Professor of Psychology, Anthropology, Education, English, Linguistics, and African and African-American Studies as well as the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University
Casey O’Callaghan is Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University
Neo Muyanga is a composer and librettist