Ghostly Resounding and Intertemporal Solidarity

Keywords: listening, intuition, interbeing, intertemporal solidarity, hauntology, medium, necropolitics.

In old Viet Nam, the citadel in the capital had one bell. Whoever felt like a victim of injustice had the right to climb the tower, ring the bell, and be listened to by all the town inhabitants. Then someone would come and ask them “Why?”, so that he or she could share about their suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh shared in a conference:

Now, we need such a bell so that bombs will not be used anymore. We have to train people in the art of deep listening and invite them into that body of listening. This is my proposal: Creating a listening body to listen to the suffering, the injustice, the discrimination that are going on. (…) We can only eliminate terrorism by the practice of restoring communication and listening deeply, and realizing that we interare with each other. ¹

In 1966, during the war that left ecocide and 1,500,000 countrymen dead across Viet Nam, Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (Thây) founded the Tiep Hien Order, the Order of Interbeing. Can a communal praxis of listening and resounding — with more-than-living entities, with human and more-than-human ancestors — enhance our understanding of our place(s) in the world(s) we live in? Can it help us embody the notion of interdependence as radical politics, aware of the historical and systemic oppressions that have silenced the world? This essay articulates the concepts of sound/vibration, listening, resounding, and resonance with the action of deepening intuition and making it possible for mediumnity to happen.

Most of the authors, concepts, and traditions cited in this text come from different geographies, times, and cultures. Although diverse, they share fundamental and complementary visions regarding life and interdependency. I aim to expand the academic vision legitimising mainly Western (and mostly male) authors from Europe or the US, who have historically nurtured their ideas from non-Western cultures, often without giving them proper credit.

The Life-Death Dichotomy

In the concrete ² world, the power structures we inhabit are based on the dichotomy between life and death. In his well-known book Necropolitics, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe explains how the one who holds the power gets to decide who lives and who dies, and moreover, how to live and how to die. ³ This dichotomy between life and death, although real — those who live can have an agency that is at least recognised as tangible by those in power— is limited when thinking about the possibilities of communal praxis. Modern Western culture understands life and death as opposites, directly connected to the capacity to physically exist and have agency in a tangible reality; in turn, most non-Western (also pre-modern Western) cultures understand life as a continuum, and death is not seen as disappearance, but as a different way of existing in the world.

For concrete power, being physically present is the fundamental and most basic form of agency (let’s think about the death penalty as the maximum sentence in several legal structures around the world). This importance of physical presence is also why keeping someone alive in harsh conditions like prison, torture, war, or poverty sends a powerful message: If you go against that who has the right to kill, you may be pushed to a condition where you find yourself begging for your life to end. A crime like forced disappearance is such a cruel form of torture precisely because the victim is not only the missing person in question (who has most likely been murdered), but also their family and friends who are not able to physically find the body/corpse or the story behind their relative’s vanishing.

Necropower’s sovereignty is exercised not only through physical and material injury but also through these states of suspension that can be life-long. The vestiges, last words, and shadows of a person who has suddenly vanished become the only way to relate to their presence, to find echoes that serve as clues for reaching them. It is through this activation of hints that a relative or a community finds some relief and, in some cases, justice.

In a dream, Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal showed his mother the location where he was murdered and the path he went across with his kidnappers, the Colombian National Army. ⁴ On the night of Óscar Alexander Morales Tejada’s murder, Doris Tejada, his mother, woke up with a pain in her stomach. In her dreams, she saw a pasture with trees, grass, and a large stone through which a liquid was filtering through a fissure from which some birds were drinking water. Both men had been killed in rural areas of Northern Colombia, hundreds of miles away from their homes in Soacha and Fusagasugá, in Central Colombia. Alongside Fair and Óscar, other executed civilians communicated with their relatives — their mothers in particular — by establishing a presence in their homes or neighborhoods.

In these cases, the dead collaborated with their families to help them find relief and justice. A few years ago, Lydia Lunch heartfully said in a concert in Bogotá “Your country is a huge graveyard” — and she was right. Although we think about death as a loss — which it undeniably is, in the concrete world —, we need to set other ways to relate with our ghosts and ancestors, which are not only humans but rivers, non-human species, and sometimes entire ecosystems that have succumbed to war and greed, as well as the stories they carry, which reverberate in our daily lives.

Expanding the notions of what life, subjectivity, and consciousness can be is not a new idea at all. Also through dreams, ancestors advise and guide the Misak Taitas through their community struggles, or warn Wayuu Mothers about the future of their clans; an Amazonian shaman can communicate with the forest thanks to life-long training and plants used for acquiring a higher level of consciousness; Aymara cosmopraxis does not contemplate the notion of objects, instead regarding them as subjects whose existence and physical manifestation depend directly on the relations they establish with other entities.

One step towards this renewed relationship is to understand Life and Death not as opposites, but Life as a shared form of universal consciousness that inhabits different dimensions, and Death as part (maybe a small one) of Life’s many transformations. In his 2024 Holberg Lecture at the University Aula in Bergen, Mbembe mentions

In the society where I grew up, the genuine interest in earthly matters […] proceeded too from the deep conviction expressed in myths, rituals and legends, that human beings were part of a very deep history that was older than the existence of the human race.

This history of entanglement with multiple other species required that the reality of objects be rethought beyond human meanings and uses, in their thingness and in their animate materiality. Matter, on the other hand, was not an inert receptacle of forms that came from outside. To be a full human person was not necessarily to act autonomously, but to know how to share agency with every non-human entity, with the goal of creating and sustaining a milieu for life. ⁵

A good example of this can be found in pre-columbian ocarinas, which are designed not to mimic an entity or animal’s sound, but to establish more-than-human, interspecies communication. Ocarinas are subjects, not utilitarian objects or musical instruments. Composer Luis Fernando Franco, who has devoted his life to understanding pre-columbian ocarinas under the guidance of Indigenous spiritual leaders from Northern Colombia, shared with El Espectador newspaper that, although initially not all the Kogui mamos (spiritual leaders from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta) agreed to let him play thousand-years-old ocarinas as a mestizo musician from the city, the mamos Camilo, Agustín, and Seshankwa still invited him to do so. Seshankwa told Luis Fernando: “Play them, they are sad… But don’t think that you will make music.” —How to play an instrument without making music? Franco asked. Seshankwa answered: “Listen to the sea, listen to the peaks.” Franco stresses the lessons from his teachers:

Ocarinas are much more than clay artifacts. They preserve the spirit of both their creator and their performer within. In their sound, they express the memory of our ancestors. They are a bridge where today and sound memory cohabit in dialogue with nature. ⁶

Listening and Resounding as Tools For Intuition

As the practice of Luis Fernando Franco demonstrates, listening as an expansive practice serves as a means of developing the intuition needed for establishing communication with other entities and dimensions. The spirits of our ancestors, the land, or their forgotten and silenced histories, are not merely remnants; they are active participants in our collective lives. By listening to these spectral traces and acknowledging their ongoing impact on the present, we can find new forms of allyship that transcend the concrete world, and create a framework for interdependence rooted in the recognition that all vibrations — past, present, and future — are expressions of life in constant flux.

In the work of sound artist Leonel Vásquez, these silenced voices are both human and non-human entities/beings such as stones, bodies of water, trees, or cetaceans. Some of these artworks articulate human memories from specific communities with the non-human memories of the trees, like Canto de los yarumos (2015) does with the Yarumos of the Memory, Peace and Reconciliation Center of Bogotá, or Cantos silentes en cuerpos de madera (2017) with the trees of Santo Domingo, Arauca. ⁷ In other works like Jagüey (2016) or Aguas Blancas (2016), the recurring voices are those of water, which according to Leonel:

(…) have led me to understand that we are living in times of water: times of dry, diverted, dammed rivers that drag mountains, of displaced, sectorised, instrumentalised, and noisy seas, of uninhabitable waters sometimes in abundance, other times in scarcity, intense and unexpected changes. In short, times in a new biological and cultural metric. ⁸

Canto rodado, by Leonel Vásquez, is a project on water landscapes in Colombia that Vásquez has been developing for several years. It has resulted in several artworks and installations in which the rocks from the rivers or Abuelas (Grandmas) are those entities who guard the memory of these bodies of water. The installations and performances make the rocks sing in a gentle and ritualistic way. Vásquez cites Humberto Ak’abal: “Piedras: Altares de los abuelos, / —escuchas eternos, / duras en su silencio, / durísimas en sus respuestas” (Stones: Altars of the grandparents, / —eternal listeners, / hard in their silence, / very hard in their answers).

Listening is not a passive act but an active tool for cultivating and deepening intuition, and for listening to those that are not audible. It opens up the senses to let vibrations shape and affect one another. Listening needs resonance, which does not happen only in an auditory dimension, but is also a tactile and psychological experience.

Resonating and resounding are intrinsically communal acts that create spaces where the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, can get together by mutual activation through vibration. If resonating has to do with how other beings’ sounds physically activate materials and bodies, resounding takes a step further and adds our voices and silences to the soundscape we are part of. By listening we open ourselves up to being touched by others’ energies, while resonance and resounding helps us co-create new realities and become aware of the larger whole in which we exist. These are tools to practice care and mutual support, recognising that our collective well-being depends not only on the connections we make in the here and now but also on the invisible energies that shape us: traditions, ancestors, and long-forgotten struggles and stories.

In her book YANAK UYWAÑA (in Spanish, La crianza mutua de las artes; in English, The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts), Elvira Espejo Ayca ⁹ refers to Amta yarachh uywaña as the mutual nurturing of thoughts and feelings:

I cultivate thoughts, and thoughts are within my body, within the landscape, within the instruments/tools that intervene. This synergy of ideas can be from a child to an older person, from an older person to a girl, from an idea of ​​the instrument to a person.

You are not the rationaliser, but rather you have required those connectivities, experiences and sensitivities to be able to generate this amta yaracch uywaña, the shared thought, which leads you to new creativities. ¹⁰

In Spanish, we use the expression “poner cuidado” (the equivalent of paying attention) when referring to attentive listening. The literal translation of poner cuidado is to “put on care”. I find this idiomatic relation fundamental to thinking about listening as a political practice of care, and about resounding as a coherent interaction (not necessarily consonant or delicate) that results from careful listening.

Both listening and resounding are practices anchored in intersubjective agency. When we listen, we are also being listened to. How, when, and what/whom shall we listen to? What sounds or silences are we re-producing, exploring, amplifying, accompanying, or expanding? Who are we listening to, and who is listening to us?

Intuition, as sensory wisdom, integrates sensory knowledge that is deeply attuned to subtle signals, which are not always rational. It is the ability to interpret the undetected and listen to what is beyond our audible reach that constitutes the basis for a deep connection with space and time, and with those whose voices are not audible. Intuitive action merges the sensory and the rational, and the knowledge it relates to is not necessarily fixed but ever-evolving.

Although intuition is usually understood as an individual and subjective sensibility, it is anchored in the ability to read signs that carry meaning; these meanings are not necessarily hidden from others but rather are more easily sensed by those who have developed the expertise of listening. Our body (including skin, muscles, and bones) is a receptacle of vibrations and other inputs that, when merged, ¹¹ read complex information and use it for composing reality/ies.

Mediumnity for Collective Liberation

In a collapsing world, where whiteness, along with the dominant capitalist system we live in, determines the type of realities we are allowed to accept, mediumnity can be a ritualistic possibility for collective liberation, a part of the struggle for autonomy that is born in the margins of the concrete world.

The term medium, although closely linked with Spiritualism and Spiritism (the latter in turn connected with the Christian religion), serves here as a common word to refer to a being that can establish communication with non-living entities. In the nineteenth century, the Spiritualist movement provided one of the first and most important forums for women’s voices to enter the public sphere (Sconce, 2000). Most mediums were white women, and mediumship was thought to be a function of the “electrical” constitution of women. It is not a coincidence that the term “medium” became popular for Spiritism around the same time the telegraph was invented. According to Jeffrey Sconce,

More than a metaphor, the spiritual telegraph was for many an actual technology of the afterlife, one invented by scientific geniuses in the world of the dead for the explicit purpose of instructing the land of the living in the principles of utopian reform. ¹²

To be a medium is, in part, to become an interface where different information or energies can pass through, an instrument allowing ideas to be performed and communication with other entities to happen. A sonic instrument is both an extension of the body and an amplifier of its vibrations, creating new ways of being in the world.

This blending challenges our traditional conceptions of consciousness. How does the interaction between mind, body, instrument, and environment shape a new form of awareness? Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term interbeing to explain how none of us can exist independently from others. The notion of interbeing establishes that everything is full of the cosmos and empty of separate existence:

When we see the flower we have the impression that the flower is full of everything: there is sunshine inside, a cloud, the earth, the mineral, even our consciousness is in the flower, also time and space. It looks like everything in the cosmos has come together in order for the flower to manifest as a wonder. ¹³

Every time I offer incense or prostrate before the altar in my hermitage, I do not do this as an individual self but as a whole lineage. Whenever I walk, sit, eat, or practice calligraphy, I do so with the awareness that all my ancestors are within me at that moment. I am their continuation. ¹⁴

In 2024, Mexican sound artist Tania Candiani created Cuando el río suena (When the River Sounds), ¹⁵ a sonic sculpture that served as an interactive musical instrument for people to resound with the acoustics of the exhibition space by playing it. The work proposes the recovery of the natural course of the Medellín River (originally named Aburrá River), lost after its canalisation in the 1950s; through a ritual correspondence with the river’s primordial trace, it enabled action on its current state through hearing and touch.

The works Cuando el río suena (When The River Sounds) and Tornarse montaña (To Become a Mountain) at the Medellin Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photo credit: Carlos Arango/MAMM.

Tania invited some musicians and dancers to create performances for this sculpture. After getting her invitation, it was clear to me that this needed to be a way to channel the Aburrá River and ask it/them about its/their story. Perhaps one never bathes in the same river because the river is a multiple entity, a set of beings occupying many dimensions. What did the ancestors of the river(s) want to tell us? They talked about violence and the kidnapping of water and allied beings, but they also occupied and activated the acoustic space of the museum hall. We felt how the ghostly voices of the river traveled through the space in its original meandering form, reclaiming a territory that, before becoming a factory and a museum, belonged to Aburrá.

Hablando con el río. Transcomunicación con el abuelo Aburrá (Talking to the River. Transcommunication with Grandpa Aburrá) was a performance is a ritual of communication with the spirit of the Aburrá River, with the non-human beings who amplify its multiple voices, and with the ancestors who inhabited and cared for it before its channeling. The sculpture Cuando el río suena (When The River Sounds) by Tania Candiani, served as an instrument of communication to bring together the river’s present, pasts, and futures. Photo credit: Daniela Molina/MAMM.

The medium I advocate for is a sort of cyborg: a merge between living bodies, sonic instrument(s), and resonant spaces, that together embody a shared consciousness allowing us to become something greater, a channel through which the unseen and unheard can pass. It is about discovering a different way of communicating with the space you inhabit, with other entities, with the environment, and how you create a reality that is both contingent and present through sound. Sound, as a material for this exchange, becomes a way to bridge the temporal gap between past & present, human & non-human, and tangible & spectral.

Sound creates an embodied experience that unites individuals within a shared field of energy. It transcends boundaries of language, culture, and identity, allowing us to recognise one another beyond ourselves. Additionally, vibration, as a fundamental dimension of existence, holds an ongoing rhythm that ties us to each other and to everything around us. Bodies become sites where vibrations can be channeled, performed, and felt. We vibrate perpetually and put into practice our interdependence through listening, resonance, and resounding.

A community does not merely exist in the here and now; it exists across times, resonating with the ghosts of its past while building a collective future. Mediumnity draws on the echoes of ancestors, histories, and landscapes that continue to reverberate through time. This is the essence of communal praxis built through listening and resounding: a practice that acknowledges the spectres of the past, invites them into the present, and through this encounter creates new shared ways of being in the world. By resonating with our echoes as inputs that are not just “heard” but actively engaged with, we make space for mutual support and collective transformation. As we listen and re-sonate with the past and present, we co-create a contingent reality that shapes a dynamic community rooted in the interconnections between all beings.

References

• Espejo Ayca, Elvira. “Yanak Uywaña: The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 55–56 (September 1, 2023): 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/729130 .

• Ellen. “The 2024 Holberg Lecture, by Achille Mbembe - Holbergprize.” Holbergprize, September 16, 2024. https://holbergprize.org/news/holbergforelesningen-2024-av-achille-mbembe/ .

• Escobar Franco, José David. “Ocarinas de mil años que todavía cantan: La lucha de Luis Fernando Franco.” El Espectador, March 4, 2023. https://www.elespectador.com/el-magazin-cultural/ocarinas-de-mil-anos-que-todavia-cantan-la-lucha-de-luis-fernando-franco/ .

• Garrison Institute. “The Insight of Interbeing.” Garrison Institute, August 2, 2018. https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/insight-of-interbeing/ .

• Hanh, Thich Nhat. Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. 3rd ed. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2003.

• Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

• Ruiz Valencia, Ana. “Leonel Vásquez: Desilenciar lo oculto desde la escucha.” Aural Magazine, vol. 5. Valparaíso, Chile: Aural – Tsonami, 2023.

• Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

• Vásquez, Leonel. “Jagüey. Laboratorio sonoro de hidráulica poética.” Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas 11, no. 2 (2016): 299–306.

Footnotes

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn_eVo-iey0 ↩
2. This text uses real to encompass the tangible, but also the many non-tangible, spiritual, and imaginary worlds. I use the word concrete to differentiate this from an expanded notion of reality. ↩
3. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩
4. One of the 6,402 civilians kidnapped and executed by Colombian military forces, and presented as a guerilla fighter in exchange for institutional rewards and promotions. His story is available in: “Luz Marina Bernal: Una madre de Soacha víctima de los falsos positivos,” El Tiempo, accessed June 15, 2025, https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/luz-marina-bernal-una-madre-de-soacha-victima-de-los-falsos-positivos-539269 . ↩
5. Ellen, “The 2024 Holberg Lecture, by Achille Mbembe - Holbergprize,” Holbergprize, September 16, 2024, https://holbergprize.org/news/holbergforelesningen-2024-av-achille-mbembe/ . ↩
6. José David Escobar Franco, “Ocarinas de mil años que todavía cantan: La lucha de Luis Fernando Franco,” El Espectador, March 4, 2023, https://www.elespectador.com/el-magazin-cultural/ocarinas-de-mil-anos-que-todavia-cantan-la-lucha-de-luis-fernando-franco/ . ↩
7. In 2023 I published an essay about Leonel Vásquez for Aural Magazine, edited by Tsonami Editions in Valparaíso, Chile, from which I have recovered these references to his work. Please see: Ana Ruiz Valencia, “Leonel Vásquez: Desilenciar lo oculto desde la escucha,” Aural Magazine 5 Decolonize Listening (Valparaíso, Chile: Aural – Tsonami, 2023). ↩
8. Leonel Vásquez, Tierras de mar, accessed June 15, 2025, http://www.leonelvasquez.com/obra/tierras-de-mar/ . (Translation from Spanish by the author.) ↩
9. Elvira Espejo Ayca is an Aymaran artist, poet, and researcher. ↩
10. Elvira Espejo Ayca, “Yanak Uywaña: The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 55–56 (September 1, 2023): 32–45, https://doi.org/10.1086/729130 . ↩
11. It is well known now that we do not perceive reality through five senses but many more. This sensitive information is interconnected to create complex non-visual and more-than-visual images. ↩
12. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). ↩
13. Thich Nhat Hanh, “The River of Mind,” Dharma Talk, Deer Park Monastery, 2011. ↩
14. Garrison Institute, “The Insight of Interbeing,” Garrison Institute, August 2, 2018, https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/insight-of-interbeing/ . ↩
15. As part of her exhibition Ofrenda, at the Medellin Museum of Modern Art. ↩