Homing: Departures/Arrivals | Archive Of Belonging & Umi Hsu

Departures/Arrivals is an experimental audio memoir that explores the architecture of memory. Using an autoethnographic method, Umi Hsu revisits sites significant to their biography in Taiwan before they immigrated to the United States: the apartment building they grew up in, walks they took with family, the school they attended, etc.

At each site, Hsu activates a memory recall in response to the spatial and acoustic qualities of the built environment. In doing so, memory is used as a score; and the body, voice, and the built environment become instruments. Each instance of a site-specific performance unravels clusters of memories and is captured as a recording. This iterative practice brings together non-narrative fragments of what is remembered and ascertains what could not possibly be remembered.

Departures/Arrivals addresses dischronotopicality (Esther Peeren, 2006), a diasporic subjectivity that experiences a collapse between time and space, a jumbled sense of time and space that occurs when time/space is stretched and compressed at once. This project wrestles with a consciousness split between a lived timeline and a presumed timeline that speculates what life would have been like without the migration experience. With an insistence on marking the body in time/space, this project also calls into question the assumed absence of the recordist’s body in field recording practices.

"This project was commissioned by 聽說 Ting Shuo Hear Say as part of Post Pandemic Acts: Therapeutic Auditory Tell Tales. Funding support from National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan." Departures/Arrivals is part of Homing, a four-part audio exhibition, presented online on archive of belonging (www.archiveofbelonging.org). Each month the exhibition is reformated and a new mixtape is introduced, as something to be carried easily, and lightly. For Homing, the artists and musicians were invited to make a mixtape (in the broadest sense of the term) in response to the complex question, what are the sounds of belonging? Especially considering that sound is the first sense we develop in the womb. And hearing our mother’s voice, discerning it from background noises, is our primal step toward becoming an individual while still very much being more-than-an-individual, belonging in that moment to the womb, to our first home. We know this sense of home with all of our body, by just the first sounds we hear in this world.

Schedule: Part 1: ILYICH Part 2: Tremble Borders Part 3: unrequited lullabies Part 4: Departures / Arrivals Tracklist Every Floor Has A Different Color Small Island, Big Island Hey Hair Me Today Go Home Daydream Building: A Sound Performance with Umi Hsu, LACMA, October 1, 2023, live performance recording (excerpt)