“Dissociated” is a sculptural form made of multiple handmade speakers. These handmade speakers are made of materials like leather-parchment, steel, cardboard, and plastic. The outer body of the audio sculpture will also be made of similar materials, however the current prototype has an outer body of cardboard (for ease of experimentation). The materials shake and vibrate like a diaphragm to produce sound, and in this course, add the sound of their own materiality to the sound-media passing through them. Due to the handmade and bare-bone nature of these speakers, they are also able to articulate inaudible and unintelligible sounds, but as movement. This gives the whole sculpture an animated presence— it shakes and oscillates as various handmade speakers pull and push the sculptural body from within.
The work is an analogy for ‘sudra’ existence, who remain dissociated from their own caste oppression while serving as pawns in the very propaganda that makes them suffer. Much of the caste propaganda is aural, oral, and loud, involving modes of storytelling and music that is broadcasted beyond its religious containment through loudspeakers. While the content of this theological media dissociates the oppressed castes from their own value, its loudness somatically dissociates the body from thinking or listening to the self. This technologically amplified dissociation sustains a historical casteist function that is coded in the term ‘sudra’ itself. Deeming not just workers but work itself as an action that is knowledge-less, the term ‘sudra’ dissociates agency-driven work from the action of knowing.
Like an apparatus/speaker, sudras are supposed to pass ‘content’ (media and signals) through their bodies without altering them through their existence. This audio sculpture, however, by using various materials to build the speaker, and employing unintelligible audio, makes the materiality of sudra-apparatus visible and audible.