Audible Traces from the Sonic Undercommons
It is in the performance of raw and intimate expressions—unregulated, extra-musical, and riotous—that flamenco cultivates community and exerts defiance.
Flamenco is a diasporic, living archive shaped by the legacies of empire, trade routes, and migrations that linked southern Spain to North Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. It is an embodied practice that emerges from the intersections of Gitano, Black, Jewish, and Andalusian cultures, whose shared marginalities as Spain’s ethnic underclass formed an undercommons of expression and meaning making. Embraced and cultivated by the underbelly of Spanish society, flamenco faced (aural) discrimination and marginalization; it was stigmatized and undermined, and yet subsequently transformed into a symbol of national identity.
In the project Sedopitna (2023–ongoing)—a collaboration between artists Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero—flamenco is treated as a sonic agent. It acts as a protagonist, carrying the memory of transcultural encounters, flows, and (post)colonial legacies. The installation comprises nine flamenco songs played through four sound boxes wrapped in embroidered flamenco shawls—today a Spanish national emblem, but first introduced to Spain through the trading port city of Manila, where Spanish ships stopped on their journey from China to Europe. Each song is a portal, layered with history and events, and recalling figures, places, and encounters. Each title is an opportunity for the recollection of flamenco’s many agents, moving listeners through an archipelago of sonic experiences across the Pacific Ocean and the Iberian Peninsula.
These subaltern songs produce a counter-archive and memory, and perform what Gascia Ouzounian proposes we think of as a kind of counterlistening—that is, a way of “listening against” hegemonic narratives, official histories, and dominant spatial logics. Such listening demands an awareness of how sound and music carry the residues of power, trauma, and resistance.1 Arguably, flamenco is indicative of a sonic fugitive practice, where fugitivity, excess, and rupture are a mode of resistance, particularly through performance.2 It is in the performance of raw and intimate expressions—unregulated, extra-musical, and riotous—that flamenco cultivates community and exerts defiance.
This is experienced in songs such as antípodas jitanos thai, which maps the extension of Gitano identities to nomadic communities across the Pacific Ocean. In this song, we hear shouts of celebration accompanied by melancholic undertones. Wailing is supplemented with foreboding drumming; extra-musical expressions are distorted, evoking the sonic embodiment of persecution, displacement, and disorientation. De Elche and G. Romero recall science-fictional figures of Drexciyans—water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of African slaves thrown overboard in the Atlantic Ocean, whose existence imagines a counter-future forged in refusal and resilience.3 Such a speculative gesture resonates with flamenco’s own fugitive logic: a sound that emerges from histories of persecution and marginality, yet projects toward other modes of being, listening, and remembering.
Listening to flamenco through the filter of colonial entanglements and transoceanic rifts materializes traces of its history and practice, and reveals the music’s connection beyond the Iberian peninsula. The cosmographic speculation of geographies during the “Age of Discovery” was a projection of European desire for uncharted territories—desires which developed into routes of trade and colonial influence across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. The imperial reimagining of space in what became known as the Spanish Pacific, or Spanish East Indies, served to legitimize Spain’s claim over Asia and the Pacific.
The desire for the unknown yet imagined geographies at the other end of the globe, produced the Antipodes, an intangible and unknown space, which came to represent inversion, or that which is beyond, but also backwards, or behind. The antipodean as a concept situated the rest of the world in relational terms—a spatial conceptualization expressed through maps, often more a set of theoretical propositions (catalysing exploration) than statements of scientific veracity.4 Such conjecturing of southern lands in pursuit of an elsewhere, coupled with preconceived designs of the world, led to the Spanish expedition of 1519, which set in motion sensorial encounters across the world, turning archipelagos such as the Philippines into crucial anchors for commerce and colonial expansion. The Galleon Trade, for example, connected Manila and Acapulco, bringing Asia into contact with the rest of the world, and moving materials, spices, textiles, and sonic cultures into new circulatory systems.
What Sedopitna reveals is a sonic cartography of flamenco whose legacies and lineages are carried, embraced, but also rejected. The project, much like the musical tradition, demonstrates the inherent mutability of culture, despite the persistent sentiment that prioritizes well-fortified zones and “imagined” purities. There is no purity in flamenco, only plurivocalities. It emerges from transient, promiscuous, and indiscriminate encounters with people and traditions, resonating with Paul Gilroy’s assertion of the generative possibilities of music through movement and displacement (in the case of the Black Atlantic), and Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of cultural identity as heterogenous and anti-essentialist.5
Flamenco is an expression of fugitivity—a rallying of the undercommons through sound and movement. It performs counterlistening as an action that reframes listening as an act against dominance. Sedopitna listens beyond the frame, to echo Rolando Vázquez’s question: “How can we listen to what is outside the monopoly of representation?”6
Notes
1 Gascia Ouzounian, "Counterlistening," English Studies in Canada 46, no. 2–4 (June/September/December 2020): 311–17.
2 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
3 See Drexciya The Quest (Submerge, 1997)
4 See Andrew Pekler’s Phantom Islands: A Sonic Atlas (2018) and Joaquín Torres-García’s América Invertida (1943).
5 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Rutherford Jonathan (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–37.
6 Rolando Vázquez, "Listening as Critique," in Buried in the Mix, ed. Bhavisha Panchia (Memmingen, Germany: MEWO Kunsthalle, 2017), 44.
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer of contemporary art whose work centers on the social, cultural, and ideological signification of sound in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses, and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the Global South. She has curated programs and exhibitions locally and internationally, some of which include Sounding a Black Grammar (New York, 2023), Sounding the Void, Imaging the Orchestra V.1, A4 Arts Foundation (2019), '32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation (2019), For the Record, ifa-Galerie Berlin (2018); writing for the eye, writing for the ear, Centre for the Less Good Idea (2018); and Buried in the Mix, MEWO Kunsthalle (2017).
