Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist for twenty-two years, he has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, the Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE SANTA FE, the Kennedy Center, and other venues. As an educator, he is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 he received the MacArthur Fellowship.

Marie-Ann Yemsi is an independent exhibition curator and contemporary art consultant based in Paris, France. With a degree in political science, Yemsi pays particular attention to theoretical, critical, and aesthetic productions in the
Global South and develops multidisciplinary art programs at the intersection of the visual arts, performance, dance, music, and writing. Her projects focus on collaborative art practices and experimental forms, highlighting themes
such as memory, history, gender, and identity in relation to contemporary political, social, and ecological issues. She has organized numerous international exhibitions including, most recently, the group exhibition Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Grada Kilomba’s A World of Illusions, at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa.

Katsitsanoron (Kat) Dumoulin-Bush is Onkwehonwe/French Canadian from Oshahrhè:’on (Chateauguay), Quebec. They received their BA in Linguistics from Concordia University in 2017. Kat has worked as an educator in indigenous communities across Quebec; teaching mathematics, science, music, special education, and kindergarten in Tasiujaq, Eastmain and Kahnawake. They have also worked in radio as a DJ and music journalist. Katsitsanoron considers themselves a “non-disciplinary” artist and curator; using experiential learning as a principal medium to make work and exhibitions that pose and respond to questions about sexual, racial, and interpersonal identity. As an artist, they have completed residencies at Artexte (2023) and The Banff Centre (2024); and at daphne art centre as a curatorial resident for the 2023 edition of MOMENTA. Passionate about arts and arts management, they have frequently collaborated with daphne arts centre, Maison de la culture Rosemont-la-Petite-Patrie, and the MAC. Kat is currently the Indigenous art and design intern at the MBAM, an educational assistant and cultural mediator at MOMENTA, and a board member of the CACPA.

“I am speaking about the contrary motion of navigating a world that assumes where you are going because of where you come from.”
—Raven Chacon¹

Raven Chacon’s work, while inspired by the actors and events that mark contemporary Indigeneity and life on our planet, moves beyond the conventions typically associated with Indigenous music and sound production. With a love of music stemming from Navajo songs sung to him by his grandfather, Chacon continued to pursue this passion through classical training as a pianist and later through noise bands. He later undertook studies in fine arts at the University of New Mexico and at the California Institute of the Arts. Since then, Chacon has participated in international collaborations, mentored young Indigenous composers with the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, and was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass.

The premise of his work is deceptively understated; field and studio recordings or sometimes live performances are coupled with their unconventional scores. Standard musical scores are visualized using a five-line staff with different dots representing music notes as well as other key symbols that allow musicians to interpret and perform the piece as intended. Chacon, however, uses a graphic score which replaces traditional notation with creative and non-standard images and symbols. His scores act as visual artworks that transform the composition from one that is purely musical with religious and European origins, into one whose divergent aesthetics allow for a multiplicity of creative readings and interpretations.

The journey from a sound piece’s conception to reception can be thought of as a series of relays in which information is transferred across various media. The first relay begins with the composer’s inspiration to create. The score is a visual record of this. The musician tasked with interpreting the score, reads it like a book. This is the second relay. From the notation, they glean and embody information about the inspiration and composer and relay it back to the audience via their performance. As a third relay, the audience interprets the performance through the lens of their own unique life experiences. Often, the relays end here. However, through the visuals in the exhibition, Chacon brings the audience’s attention back to the point of origin: the score. By laying bare the score along with the sound, both performer and audience are free to equally interpret the graphic and create with instruments or with their imagination their own response; thus completing the relay or starting one anew.

This sequence informs a process of reading Chacon’s work which can be considered an antiphonal experience: a sonic call-and-response. The listener-viewer is constantly informing and being informed in a cycle of processing that alternates between sound and image. By becoming enveloped in the work and in the cycle, individual interpretations create new meanings born from listening in new ways.

A recurring motif in Chacon’s work is the juxtaposition between silence and cacophony. In moments where sound is deliberately absent; the silence demands attention. At other times, the agglomeration of sound creates a sense of aural chaos. Fragmented voices, the sounds of drones and artillery fire come together in the exhibition, evoking bewilderment. In each case the listener’s ear searches intently for something, anything to situate them. Often rooted in site specificity, in locations considered to be “empty”, Chacon’s work expands unto universal themes of suppressed histories and ongoing resistance. In doing so, the audience is positioned as a witness to these realities otherwise minimized.

This is what Raven Chacon’s work does—it reconnects us through silences and amplifies the voiceless in our everyday lives, the land, the winds, the waters—drawing our ears towards the objects and people that hold important stories, songs, and sounds that gain resilience through our collective listening.

Katsitsanoron Dumoulin-Bush, Educational Assistant, MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain & Prakash Krishnan, Coordinator, Public Programs and Education, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery

1 Raven Chacon, “Being in a position,” in Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak, eds. Alison Coplan, Katya Garcia-Anton, and Stefanie Hessler (London: Sternberg Press, 2024), 13.

Still Life No. 3, 2015
24 glass panels engraved with text, aluminum mount spacers, 16 speakers, stereo amplifiers, stereo delay unit, audio track, LED arrays with timed colour changes

This work retells the Diné Bahane’, the Navajo story of creation and emergence into the current world. Using timed audio and delay systems, the speech of a woman telling the story in Navajo language is transferred through a series of connected speakers activating future and past parts of the same story, revealing instances when long history repeats itself. As words emanate from the speakers, voices overlap, blurring the linearity of the story.

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Position yourself at different points along the installation. How does your position in space affect the reception of the story?
How do stories themselves or their reception change over time?

What are the different moods, emotions, or atmospheres created by the changing lights? Does this change how you might interpret the tone of the story?

Storm Pattern, 2021
Woven wool and cotton fibres, stereo sound, 182.9 × 316.7 cm, 22 min. 54 sec.

Storm Pattern is a textile score and multi-channel sound installation of field recordings of flying drones at the Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp, captured on Thanksgiving weekend during the encampment. With the drones at average flight speed emitting a tone of A440, the soundtrack of the installation relays the intertwined sounds of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

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Observe the score. Based on the recording site, how might you interpret the different graphic notations used within the score? What could the different symbols represent?

What role can artists play in supporting activist movements especially as they relate to land rights and Indigenous resurgence?

Report, 2001, 2015
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 3 min. 48 sec., score on music stand, 21.6 × 27.9 cm

Report is a musical composition scored for an ensemble playing various caliber firearms. The sonic potential of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns are utilized in a tuned cacophony of percussive blasts interspersed with voids of timed silence. In the piece, guns—instruments of violence, justice, defense, and power—are transformed into mechanisms for musical resistance.

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Unlike with traditional instruments, there is no controlling for volume, pitch or tone when it comes to using firearms. What are the techniques that Chacon has used to emphasize the musicality of these weapons-turned-instruments?

How does this piece challenge or contribute to your ideas of taking up resistance within the context of colonialism?

For Zitkála Šá, 2017–2020
(For Laura Ortman), 2017
(For Barbara Croall), 2018
(For Suzanne Kite), 2018
(For Cheryl L’Hirondelle), 2018
(For Autumn Chacon), 2019
(For Carmina Escobar), 2019
(For Ange Loft), 2019
(For Heidi Senungetuk), 2019
(For Olivia Shortt), 2019
(For Jacqueline Wilson), 2019
(For Joy Harjo), 2020
(For Candice Hopkins), 2020

From the series For Zitkála-Šá, 2017–2020
Lithographs, 27.9 × 21.6 cm (unframed)

Each score is dedicated to contemporary Indigenous women working in music performance, composition, and sound art. The series is a dedication to the Yankton Dakota composer and musician Zitkála-Šá, (1876–1938) who taught violin, later writing the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), the first American Indian opera. Her work also included writing poetry, fiction, and political essays, teaching, community organizing, and founding the National Council of the American Indian. The scores draw on a range of symbols, including Western music notation, tribal geometries, and numerology, among more ambiguous designs.

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Observe each of the portrait-scores. How do the designs vary? How does the artist express each dedicatee’s individuality through the notation styling?

Based on these differences, how do you imagine each score sounding? Which kinds of genres and instruments might be expressed and used?

For Four (Caldera), 2024
Four-channel video installation, colour, sound, 6 min. 9 sec., variable dimensions

On a volcanic hollow in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, near the site of Los Alamos National Laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed, four singers face the cardinal directions. Scanning the horizon, they interpret the natural contours as a melodic score.

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How do human interventions leave scars on environments and landscapes?

What are some other ways we can retain generational memory of the land?

What melodies can you find within your own home environments? How can you be more attuned with them?

Maneuvering the Apostles, 2024
Two-channel video installation, colour, sound, 20 min., variable dimensions

Filmed at Nordlys Vind, one of Europe’s largest wind farms encroaches upon the traditional homelands of the Sámi. Maneuvering the Apostles is a prompt for a drone camera to fly as close as possible to the windmills of the farm before getting pulled into its blades. The title of the work evokes the expression “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” which speaks to how one debt is acquired to pay off another. In these instances, Indigenous people are forced to sacrifice ancestral lands, longstanding traditions, and their own sovereignty for green energy projects, which are themselves solutions to problems caused by the capitalist and colonialist systems that have sought to eradicate Indigenous peoples. Accompanying the drone footage is a soundtrack of tremolo-affected bird recordings, acknowledging the trespass of the windmills into the spaces of our vertical relations.

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This piece highlights examples of initiatives that operate under the guise of national and international (often economic) good to occupy unceded Indigenous territory and dispossess peoples from their lands. Thinking across the similarities between this intervention in Norway’s skies and Canada’s underground pipelines, how can art be in service of activisms calling for environmental sovereignty?

What are other examples of mainstream environmental or capitalist movements that been used to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their homelands?