Foreword

The first volume of this publication (2020) made the creation of a second volume urgent (as the second has recently paved the way for a third), because it proposes a challenge that does not exhaust itself but that constantly raises new questions. Furthermore, in the past two years, during which the first two volumes were conceived, the catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic hit us with waves of lockdowns, curfews and endless obituaries. Changes of colossal proportions lashed out (with different intensities) around the globe, and marked the uncertain landscape we now find ourselves in. What’s more, if a global pandemic of this magnitude wasn’t sufficient, this crisis has become a sort of prequel in the media and in political discourse, setting the tone for the upcoming Crisis. The Crisis with a capital C created by Man with a capital M: the crisis of ecological destruction that is yet to come. Yet, this double rupture forms the fissures from which Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal pours out.
As a new awareness of catastrophe grows in the West, in the global South, some have been building lives around ecological devastation for generations. Long before environmentalists introduced the term “climate change” to the vocabulary of the twentieth century—an achievement of planetary-scale computation and scientific prediction—others had no need of these mathematical calculations to notice the devastating Man-made environmental degradation of their lands, rivers and oceans. Scenarios of deforestation,[1] desertification, the disappearance of lagoons[2] or valleys are common currency in the southern reaches of the world, where the extractivist model that was once a colonial system is now promoted by neo-extractivist governments. Hence, for those who have already lived amid ecological devastation, the announcements of new times of crisis can bring about as much estrangement as familiarity. 

Our struggles, joys and contradictions closely resemble the vibrations of our territories—mountainous, seismic, volcanic, arid, fertile. Thus, this editorial endeavor takes listening as a point of departure from which to explore these geographies, their local historical conditions, asymmetries, and the practices that remain unheard. In this sense, this project aspires to be a liminal site, a subversion, a space to experiment, a question mark.
We believe that this strategy has the potential to inject unpredictability and contingency into the monolithic Euro-Western narratives. Thus, if we sneak a grain of sand from the peripheral positions of the global South (and its diasporas) into the fashionable and growing sound disciplines, it means that this edition has been fruitful. Ultimately, our main intention is to serve as a decentering force within contemporary listening practices and debates surrounding sound.
With that purpose in mind, we invited the collaborators of this volume (Ana Ruiz Valencia, Daniela Avellar, Fabián Avila and Nora Castrejón, D’Andrade, Paulo Antonio Kalankó and Alexandre Herbetta, Reiko Yamada, Rui Chaves, Teresa Díaz de Cossío and Vered Engelhard) to articulate and explore alternative practices of listening that fall outside the bounds of cripplingly heteronormative hegemonic structures, while also engaging with the ethical dilemmas of our age. We encourage and welcome essays and artistic research about soundscapes and sonic stories from Latin American, but also multispecies, intersectional approaches, indigenous ontologies and positions that contend with the Western vocabulary.
I would like to especially thank the careful attention of our proofreaders (Kirstin Cameron for the English texts and Paloma Reaño for the Spanish texts) and the authors of the essays that make up this publication for their patience and support throughout the editorial process of this issue.