photo by Hadas Hadas of Bay Davis 
          floral design by Sparkel Jewels


title
format
role
client
publication
contributors
Hear Her Here
Sonic Collage
co-director/Event producer
For Freedoms + Converse
summer 2022
produced by Kikelomo Naj Whitehead


Listen here.

An Exploration of Black Femme Visions & Voices

Hear Her Here is an archival sound work and installation, commissioned by For Freedoms, that investigates Black femme oral tradition and community building at the intersection of creative autonomy. This artifact and installation will show exclusively at the For Freedoms Hear Her Here listening party and then live as a downloadable audio assemblage.


The sound work honors For Freedom’s inaugural cohort of artists and the creative community they collectively built through the Hear Here Here initiative. It stars the five fine artists whose works live as murals throughout LA’s traditionally Black neighborhoods, and the fifteen Hear Hear Here emerging multidisciplinary Black femme artists, weaving through themes of belonging, defiance, legacy, being and dreaming. The Black Discourse archivist team explored over 10+ hours of private Zoom conversation to produce a 5 chapter sonic collage.

We invite you to listen and digest the words and stories of Black femme artists in the conversation chair designed by Brittany Byrd.



Credits:
co-production/direciton by Koumbah Semega-Janneh
Zion Estrada (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist researcher. 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 researching traditional forms of care and pod practices  and repair as they relate to mangrove and wild grass systems.

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

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