www.diaspora2487.org

Website.
Website designer: Romain Ré.
Graphic designer: Chuck Ramirez.

Giving Voice in Diaspora 2487 speaks the names of two thousand four hundred eighty seven persons who were found dead throughout the border region of Mexico and the United States. Effectually giving voice to diaspora, Sanchez’s eight-channel sound piece evolves into an audible terrain where names are generated from various positions marking the varying directions of movement across the border. Each death, that was recorded and filed, has been audibly re-recorded and re-filed by the artist as individual sound files composed to play randomly, initiating organic patterns much like migration patterns themselves. Interspersed with varying periods of silence, some names are heard in isolation while others sound like links in a chain, and many overlap. As two thousand four hundred eighty seven names are spoken the changing pace that speaks them disrupts any sense of repetition allowing the piece to extend beyond the serial monotony of name-calling. The random pattern employed in the voicing of these persons, these deaths, offers both moments of contemplation and anxiety with periods of doubt in between. That one can’t actually hear all the names, as some merge into other or are overlaid, underscores the immensity and gravity of what is being called for, not just called out–the intractability of 2487 … and 2488, and 2489, and 2490 and … More than just enunciating the sounds of each identity 2487 annunciates a calculated instability, a tension that quietly resonates throughout the piece.

Jennifer Davy