NOVEMBER 11, 2023 at 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM: Robert “Chi” Machiri and curator Erika Mei Chu Holum discuss the artist’s Houston-specific iteration of sonic movements and archival recordings from “Pungwe Sound Trails.”

Harare-born, Berlin-based artist Machiri will also perform Kinou Miyo (under the tree) a Houston iteration of sonic movements and archival recordings from his ongoing explorative Pungwe Sound Trails, one of works coming out of his project PUNGWE. PUNGWE centers sound to engage with social, political and economic concerns that are performative, to connect with peoples whose lived experience intersects with colonialism, climate change, and migration globally—from Harare to Indonesia to Berlin to Houston.

Machiri’s practice is conceived as a series of ephemeral encounters that explore relationships between people, history, and memory through intersections of sound and spatial politics.

Pungwe Sound Trails is part of Ecofictions and Understories, a city-responsive curatorial program curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum and supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, to speculate potential worlds for gathering, resisting, regeneration, and disruption persistent in artistic responses, organizing, and actions. The program connects practices of ecological and cultural safe-keeping through community organizing, sonic semiotics, and south-south relationality.

Pungwe Sound Trails is presented at the Houston Climate Justice Museum in conjunction with Climate Migrations: Displacement, Travel, Home, a series of art installations, expert panels, and public engagements that aim to deepen understanding and experiences of climate migration in Houston.