Originally commissioned for Unsound 2020 as a collective listening experience, Community of Grieving is a radiophonic ceremony that prioritizes sonic healing, communal catharsis, and mourning as resistance. Released in the midst of stringent COVID-19 lockdowns around the world, Community of Grieving incorporates a series of electronically-augmented vocalizations, drawing from lineages of vesper, lament, and open throat singing, to bemoan the systemic negligence, profound isolation, and massive loss of life that occurred at this stage of the pandemic. Throughout the piece, Hołubowska and Giertz use digital distortion to signify the delirium of illness, while the foundational sounds of the respiratory apparatus are deployed to evoke both meditation and mortality. Equally focused on remediation and confrontation, Community of Grieving presents a queer sonic activism that is rooted in practices of respite, refuge, wrath, and regenesis. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Archive Contributor 2024, Kamikaze Jones.

Curatorial statement

Radio has a rich legacy of deliberate misuse. From the mobilization of the Black Panther Party via CB Radio, to the subversive dissemination of pirate broadcasts, the insurrectionist potential of the airwaves and their propensity for revolutionary action is well documented. How does a queer affect, one marked by loss, resistance, subterfuge, transformation, and rebellion, map onto these radiophonic spaces? What paradigms of audiological intervention are implicitly queer? What can we learn from exploring the immaterial queer archive: an amorphous collection unsanctioned by the state, transmitted through utterance, gesture, noise, and paralinguistic activity?

This addition is part of an ongoing curatorial series entitled Pink Noise, which investigates contemporary strategies of queer sonic resistance and counter-archival methodology across transmission arts.-Kamikaze Jones