On the (In)audible in Art (Part I): Tracing the Sound of lo inaudito in Venezuelan Migrant Women Photographers

Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez
Hispanic Studies
UC Riverside

Elena Cardona
Hispanic Studies
UC Riverside

“On the (In)audible in Art (Part I): Tracing the Sound of lo inaudito in Venezuelan Migrant Women Photographers” is the first part of a multi-stage community-engagement project that results from the combination of two ongoing research projects, “Grammars of Listening” (Acosta) and “Poetics of Migrant Memories” (Cardona), each devoted to exploring how aesthetic strategies address one of the pernicious effects of “traumatic violence”—the breakdown of the means to make inflicted harm audible.

The main idea is to challenge the notion of photography that reduces it to the ‘visual’ while disorganizing a traditional notion of the ‘audible’ that takes away its ‘auratic’ effects. If the latter is in close conversation with Acosta’s research on “grammars of listening,” the former follows Cardona’s research and praxis as a photographer. These two projects coalesce in an exhibition on migrant photography and photography of migration, focusing specifically on Venezuelan migration from 2016 to 2022. The exhibition brings together the artwork of seven Venezuelan migrant women artists and interviews in which they share their own experiences of migration. 

Learn more about the project in this Foundry interview with Elena Cardona.