Unheard Soundscapes: Environmental Racism, and the Act of Imagination
What happens to our soundscape when the voices, songs, dreams, and stories of marginalized communities are lost? Whose voices are heard in our society? Whose are not heard? Helen Stoltzfus will present excerpts from her piece, The Dream Inside Us, where she weaves together stories from San Francisco where black and brown folks demand to be heard, and from the marginalized Anishinaabe of Northern Minnesota resisting the Line 3 oil pipeline. She maintains that environmental justice demands not only action, but more deeply, a sacred act of imagination in which the songs and sounds of ignored peoples are summoned forth and listened to.
Helen Stoltzfus is a San Francisco-based climate activist whose work is performed worldwide, from Los Angeles to Europe to Appalachia and elsewhere. The Dream Inside Us, about the climate/ecological crisis, presents a dream that sustains us, from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert to San Francisco’s toxic-ridden Bayview, from Civil War resistance stories to today’s climate protests as a vehicle for engaging in the biggest crisis humans have faced in 200,000 years. She is a founder/co-director of the Bay Area Black Swan Arts & Media https://www.blackswanarts.org/dream
