Curator’s Note
For the 59th Carnegie International, Dang A Dang Radio has been commissioned to produce five radio episodes, which will be broadcast on the museum’s website from September through the end of the International.
Each episode emerges from a live event held off-site in the Philippines and co-organized by like-minded organizations and collaborators. Between episodes, the collective will broadcast field recordings from protest assemblies collected through various open calls, capturing what the collective describes as the “sonic political ambience of our time.”
Sound Assembly
Sound Assembly is a collection of field recordings that signify the sonic political ambience of our time, and capture specific moments of protest unfolding in public– such as mobilizations, public speeches, street performances, and other real-time happenings– in capsules of sonic memory. Inspired by street photography or videography, the project aims to document moments that can be re-listened to, providing listeners the perspective of shared active listening.
Listening to field recordings engages the listener’s imagination and allows them to position themselves in that sonic memory in time, as well as associate the sound with their own interpretations. For example, listening to a recording of a protest action wherein the listener was not present allows them to be immersed in that moment, and actively locate themselves in that memory through related information and sonic context clues. Shared listening then becomes an act of collective reflection, combining various political sounds that makes processing memories somewhat more tangible.
Open Call
We invite sound artists, enthusiasts, and listeners alike to submit field recordings, poetry readings, chants, public speeches, street performances, educational discussions, memes, documentation of mobilizations, soundbites, and any audio material that signifies the people’s resistance. We are accepting submissions that respond to the questions:
- How do you define sounds of protest? What is political sound?
- How do we build collective noise / sound / voice that liberates?
Let’s build an audio library that captures the sonic political ambience of our time. These recordings will be reviewed and broadcast online on Dang A Dang Radio. This ongoing archive will be made available for artists to use, sample, or remix to create sound compositions.
For this open call, we’ll be exploring the following themes:
- Land & Self-Determination
- Government Accountability
- Climate Justice
- Palestine
Feel free to interpret the themes in your own way through your sound submissions. Find more information on the submission form online.
Prompt # 1: Land & Self-Determination
Land is life. It’s a mantra that farmers and land defenders always say. A sentence that holds a primordial truth which is increasingly forgotten or trampled upon. It’s not a motto to contend with, but a fact nobody can escape from, not even the most comfortable, most wealthy class.
Despite this truth, widespread landlessness still persists. Seven out of ten farmers in the Philippines do not own the land they till. Almost a million jobs in agriculture have been lost under the Marcos Jr. administration, not only because of the worsening climate crisis, but also because of neo-liberal political traditions that prioritize profit over people, the government’s relentless negligence in providing enough aid, subsidy, and infrastructure to farmers and ordinary citizens, as well as ongoing state militarization in the countryside.
Farmers and activists who fight back against feudalism are met with red-tagging and violence, such as the case of Toboso 19– unarmed civilians and peasant advocates who were killed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in Negros Occidental on April 19, 2026. The incident is one among many in a decades-long pattern of extrajudicial murders perpetuated by the state, and exacerbated by the Anti-Terror Law and former president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.”
Land oppression continues to intensify not just in agricultural-industrial lands, but also in ancestral domains. Companies operating on land controlled by the comprador bourgeoisie continue to build mining sites and green energy projects that over-extract natural resources and exploit human labor. These destructive projects continue to expand in scale and numbers despite indigenous communities fighting for their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) and self-determination.
These communities, who have the deepest relationship with the land, know best that land is life. They know best that it is on land where we not only cultivate our food, but also develop social systems and collective mechanisms that allow us to reach self-subsistence as a people. This is why taking back land from those who grabbed it for greed and power means reclaiming not only our sustainable food systems, but also our culture and values that the land itself has been witness to for thousands of generations. Land holds our wisdom, and we should always learn from it. To achieve food security and justice for the future, we must always defend land from those who abuse it.
