Amplified Listening to Race and Gender in Fiamma Montezemolo’s "Echo" and Stephanie Dinkins’s "N’TOO"

Abstract

Looking retrospectively and prospectively, this article reflects on what is heard when listening to the women talking inside artworks. Both Echo (2014) by Fiamma Montezemolo and Not the Only One (N’TOO), an ongoing project by Stephanie Dinkins, present sound archives that animate spaces with fragments of dissenting women’s voices. Looking back at the impact of inSITE, a curated international art festival in the Tijuana and San Diego region, Echo amplifies the sonic remains of art produced in the context of NAFTA. In N’TOO a living AI archive is potentiated as a fourth generation in the artist’s family, carrying on the histories and subjectivities of three women. N’TOO optimistically intervenes in AI’s expansionist and biased trajectories by furthering Black and familial subjectivity in a specific context of racial and gender foreclosures. Despite their spare use of sound, both artworks enable amplified listening through the avatar-like objecthood afforded by gallery-based media artworks. This methodology is consistent with decolonizing efforts in Canada and has significance for artists intervening in intersectional, race, and gender studies, border studies, and in settings of computational or interactive technology.