langa dan ruop
- David Chavannes
- School of Arts & Sciences
- Student Arts Innovation Grant
David Chavannes is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Africana Studies and Ethnomusicology at Penn who grew up in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He uses sound-based storytelling to focus on senses and emotions; his goal being to relate more empathically with everyone he meets, and with anyone who encounters his work. “I care less about making research that tries to persuade someone to accept a particular interpretation, and more about making work that provides opportunities for people to be with each other, to keep each other’s company. langa dan ruop is guided by the same ethical imperative.”
How can the peoples of colonized lands relate more empathically with the human and non-human life around them? How could these relationships look, feel, and sound? By grappling with these questions, langa dan ruop * invites you to meditate on the sociopolitical and ecological legacies of colonization in the formerly British Caribbean. Created by David Chavannes, langa dan ruop is an installation comprised of sound recordings and textual fragments from a pirate radio station 100,000 years in the future. You wander the installation space and piece together a past-future that resembles our colonial present, yet departs from it by dramatizing the ways empathy and compassion can transform social relations built on domination. David will present langa dan ruop in a West Philadelphia venue in spring 2021.
An example of a previous sound project by David Chavannes:
* “Langa dan ruop” is a phrase in Jamaican Patwa that means “longer than rope,” and is taken from a traditional proverb, “Time longer than rope.”