title
format
location
archive

Black Femme Relationality
Feild Recording
St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica
The Only Return Is Sonic Archive


Listen here.

The sound of synchronized sisterhood.

The sonic choreography in a nail salon amongst folks who have a shared feminized experience.

The distance between friends in different chairs lowers the voice level but not the depth of the conversation. What is not captured in these sound pieces are the non-verbals.

The facial expression made between the spa staff and friends when people enter late, wait too long or have a topic they want to bring up to the group and don't know how.

In deep listening you can hear the breeze and ocean agreeing with the commentary.


Zion Estrada (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist researcher living on Gabrielleno/Tongva/Chumash Land. Her work flows between archival assemblage filmmaking, sonic collage production and experiential design centering human and more-than-human (re)connection.

Zion’s  experimental collage language in film and sonic works often use layering of field recordings, found sounds and carefully curated sound clips that score a line of discourse that complicate temporality, history and meaning making. Her practice is informed by the palimpsest and Pauline Olivero’s Deep Listening. 

She is most interested in the non-verbal and more-than-human qualities of storytelling from the African diaspora (specifically the Caribbean) and how sounds hold the spirits of the past and the alchemic power to magnetize communities, movement, moods, and healing. She draws from the traditions of Black Trans abolitionists care making, sex worker solidarity,  doula presence practices and movement architects love of release.

Zion is currently is practicing in emergent transformative justice work with Abolition Dream lab practicing in radical learning communities how to prepare, account, release and re-story the harms we have caused, the roots the harms have in culture and systemic violence  while centering care, healing and rest.

Zion is the Creative Director of Black Discourse, co-founder of Wild Grass Design + Research Lab and owner of BZE Consultant LLC.  She holds a M.A. Ed focused in participatory research and linquistics.

PREVIOUSLY
Director of Programs at BLD PWR; holds 10yrs as educator and curriculum developer.

CURRENTLY
Board member at Citizens of Culture
Exhibitor at the Ghetto Biennale in Jacmel, Haiti 2024
Participant in MIT Worlding Project Community 2023