“The medium of sound is one of change-over-time. Even a sustained tone consists in alternating high and low pressure waves. Stasis is a perceptive mask; sound is dynamism and temporality.
This project, too, is change-over-time. Histories juxtapose ad hoc, each with tangible material and sonic consequences on the High Bridge and its context. In four movements:
i. 1600s: of an Indigenous Peoples’ corn field violently supplanted by colonizers’ farms of buckwheat, rye, and barley; of a wood violently cleared of its biodiversity; ii. 1848: of water restricted in flow, for other water to be enabled to flow; 1926: of those very dynamics reversed, the river turning valuable, and the aqueduct broken to accommodate; iii. 1860s: of the creation of an economy of spectacle, a place to see and to be seen, over cries raised by local residents; iv. 1970: of sequestering the Bronx, a community in need, from the recreation center and northern Manhattan by creating a landmark; 2014: of renovation and reopening to serve locals.
Reading the High Bridge as the collection of its histories, instead of one amongst others, attempts to move away from the valuing-devaluing that gave rise to Modernity’s cycles of violence upon the site, instead proposing simultaneous, situated epistemologies.”
