CITIZEN TALES COMMONS

CHRISTA OLIVER
SWATI KSHAMA RANI
VASSILIKI RAPTI
BETSY SALERNO
HANNAH TRIVILINO

But I Hear Her is a multi-media, interactive sculpture and audio experience that explores dimensions of mothering, care, solidarity, and collective pain/healing during the Covid-19 pandemic; centers the knowings and creativities of daughters; and offers opportunities for families to nurture a practice of co-creation with their children.

Designed by transnational civic art and media collective Citizen TALES Commons' members Christa Oliver, Swati Kshama Rani, Vassiliki Rapti, Betsy Salerno, and Hannah Trivilino, But I Hear Her's conceptual origins come from a glitch in a vinyl record that Trivilino encountered during the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. While listening to her grandparent's records, Trivilino found a scratch on a 45 titled 'Teddy Bear' by Red Sovine that caused the record to repeat the phrase "sometimes we were crying" in a continuous loop. Curious about the original context for this recitation, Trivilino looked up the song's lyrics only to find it never actually says, "sometimes we were crying." Instead, the lyrics-while describing a boy's widowed mother-read:

"she says not to worry / that we'll make it alright / but I hear her cryin' / sometimes late at night."

Inspired by the ways the record scratch inadvertently transformed a moment of maternal isolation and struggle into a chorus of collective pain (and, therefore, collective care through solidarity), Trivilino wondered what it might be like to create a praxis of this transformation via artistic translation. To do this, she and the rest of the But I Hear Her team recorded audio accounts of their communities' experiences practicing mothering and/or other forms of caretaking devalued by systems of patriarchy during the Covid-19 pandemic. This collection of countless and multilingual audio stories from a wide range of voices and perspectives play overtop each other to create a collective chorus and individually to bear witness to the stories that may otherwise be lost to an isolated 'crying late at night' realm.

To visualize this chorus and create ways for audience members to engage the stories, Trivilino and Salerno built an interactive shrine inspired by Salerno's research on the spiritual, historical, cultural, and political significances of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Black Madonnas. Encountering the But I Hear Her shrine, one hears the collective chorus of overlaid audio stories and finds the "sometimes we were crying" record loop spinning in the sculpture's womb area. Headphones are interspersed throughout the shrine for audience members to hear the audio stories individually (with audio captions available via QR codes). Some of these headphones play a unique series of audio pieces brought to But I Hear Her by mothers & community elders translating ideas from their children and/or their communities' children. Inspired by a prompt given to her from her daughter Katerina, Rapti created a series of poems titled "A Child's Resistance," which Rapti reads in English and Greek. With Rani and Oliver following this model to co-create with their daughters, the installation features these and additional practices of mothers creating from a place inspired by their children to center the dual importance of both listening to the experiences of mothers and designing a world imagined by children when dreaming healthier futures. To connect But I Hear Her audiences with resources for facilitating such futures, But I Hear Her offers accompanying facilitation guides for families who visit the installation regarding ways they can creatively collaborate with their children.

Audiences can further interact with But I Hear Her by adding their own stories to the installation. This can occur both in the form of a paper station (where audiences can write stories about their experiences caretaking during the pandemic and add them to the sculpture's body halo area) and via take home instructions (for recording stories to upload to the But I Hear Her audio story database). Through continued integration of additional stories, But I Hear Her evolves and revolves as a living archive of motherhood during the Covid-19 pandemic and as a blueprint for life-giving futures born from childrens' imaginaries.

Citizen TALES Commons* is a transnational civic art and media collective that explores dimensions of citizenship and belonging through a praxis of co-creation, cross-cultural collaboration, compassionate curiosity, and creative inquiry. Inventive and playfully ever evolving, our open collective of scholars and artists designs life-affirming models of existence that embrace social justice, empathy, and the art of listening; fosters mentorship and ecological relationality; cultivates healthy and equitable futures; and celebrates the magic of life. Across initiatives, Citizen TALES Commons centers innovative pedagogies, epistemic plurality, diverse and inclusive research methods, and partnerships with individuals and organizations to share resources, create meaningful experiences, and generate transdisciplinary research and artistic scholarship. Our collective imagines ourselves as an ouroboros-like Greek chorus nurturing change in an unjust global world; we amplify our voice/s through cross-pollination of ideas and validation of lived experience. Citizen TALES Commons hosts 87 members across several countries and partners with many cultural organizations. The collective has featured work in gallery shows, presented at numerous conferences, published multiple academic journals and publications, curated multimedia performances, and hosted lecture series, workshops, and other educational events.

*Regarding the name:
"Citizen" refers to the Claudia Rankine Text as the collective was born from a group of people who first met while translating Citizen into their native languages for an initiative run by a The American Repertory Theater and The Racial Imaginary Institute.
"TALES" is an acronym for translators, artists, ludics learners, explorers/educators, and storytellers.
"Commons" is our commitment to open, public scholarship.

Christa Oliver is an educator, activist, dancer, choreographer, and Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University. She received a Professional Diploma in Dance Studies and a Master of the Arts degree in Dance Performance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She also completed a course of study, Migrations, at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. Her research and performance work examines bearing witness through dance and using dance as a tool for healing in places where trauma has occurred. https://www.theatreanddance.txstate.edu/dance/People/Faculty/Christa-Oliver.html

Swati Kshama Rani, Ph.D. is a writer and momma scholar with a Ph.D. in Critical Pedagogy, Language, and Literacy from Boston College (2016), a M.A. in Language, Literacy, and Youth Studies from Columbia University (2001), and a B.S. in Early Childhood Education from University of Georgia (1999). Swati currently teaches at Boston University, where she additionally serves as the Chair of the Writing Program's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. At BU she is actively involved in fostering community for faculty and staff who live with disabilities through SAFEBUDS @ BU D & I. She also serves as a mentor for BIPOC students by creating "affinity through intersectionality" spaces with a specific focus towards the Asian diaspora on campus. In addition to fostering community at BU and in her Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, Swati is known for her innovative pedagogical methods and curricular design, notably through her creation of the courses "Learning About Boston & Beyond By Walking It - Exploring One City as a Case Study to Explore Master/Counter Narratives" and "Are Asians People of Color, Race Relations and Writing."

Vassiliki Rapti, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinarian, poet, curator, editor and translator. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis (2006), an M.A. in English from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (2000), an M.A. (D.E.A.) in Greek Studies from the University of Paris-Sorbonne IV (1993), and an M.A. in Civic Media: Art and Practice from Emerson College, U.S.A (2019). During the years 2008-2016 she has served as Preceptor in Modern Greek at Harvard University, where in 2013 she co-founded and co-chaired the Ludics Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, which she has been running since then along with Citizen TALES Commons, an international collective of academics and artists working together around notions of citizenship widely understood in the service of the public good. Her publications and research interests center around ludic theory, avant-garde theatre and performance with an emphasis on Surrealism, literary theory and gender studies. She is the editor of multiple academic journals; author of several edited books, translation volumes, plays, and poetry collections; and has published extensively in various international refereed journals.

Betsy Salerno holds a Master's Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a specialization in Women's and Cultural Studies from Lesley University. Her thesis, Virgin Territory: Female Identity and Empowerment through the Dark Face of the Female Divine, examined the cultural phenomenon of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Black Madonnas in relation to their spiritual, political, historical, cultural and personal significances for women. Betsy has also examined female divinity in indigenous cultures (analyzing how these become dynamic symbols of feminine source and creativity that empower and activate women); designed and facilitated a mask-making project at Lesley University exploring the feminine face of the divine; developed the course Changing Woman Reality and Myth (which examines the lives of Native American Women); taught courses on the relationships between religion, spirituality, ecology and sustainability; and creates and practices ritual and ceremony that explores diverse spiritual ideas and meanings. She teaches Women's & Gender Studies at Merrimack College and the University of New Hampshire and is a member of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology.

Hannah Trivilino (she/her's) is a transdisciplinary artist-scholar, experiential educator, and creative consultant. Hannah is trained in Feminist and Queer Theory, which deeply informs her current and past work institutionalizing community engagement in higher education policy; training secondary education students in dialogue facilitation; co-developing transnational civic art and media collective Citizen TALES Commons; assistant teaching undergraduate Women's & Gender Studies classes; and more. Hannah has also worked on political campaigns, performed with world-renowned musicians, and won awards in community building, playwriting, and social engagement. She has performance backgrounds in sketch comedy, Ghanaian music, and Irish dance and is currently devising a cross-sensory project exploring intersections between epistemology, dis/ability, de/colonialisms, cognition, memory, and pedagogy based on the assets of her diplopic vision.