Abstract
Nowadays, women have to undertake the dance through cyberspace.
The following interview with composer Susan Campos-Fonseca took place on 16 July 2019. The interview provides insight into what it means to be a female composer in our present reality from a Latin American and feminist perspective, as well as the tools and resources we have explored looking to foster inclusion. The structure of the text entails some of Susan’s answers (which appear in italics), several quotes from her and other publications, as well as my own research on the subject.
We now know, due to the efforts of many, that Latin America is filled with women who make music. One of the most interesting is Costa Rican composer and musicologist Susan Campos-Fonseca, whose research focuses mainly on the philosophy of culture and technology, feminism, decolonial studies, electronic art and sound studies. Campos-Fonseca has a PhD in music from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain, and an MA in Spanish and Latin American philosophy from the same university. Campos-Fonseca received the 2002 University Council Award from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), the 2004 WASBE Conductor Scholarship (UK), the 2005 Carolina Foundation Scholarship (Spain), the 2007 ‘100 Latinos’ Award (Spain), the Corda Foundation Award 2009 (New York) and the 2012 Casa de las Americas Musicology Award (Cuba), and is 2013/2014 UCR Distinguished Scholar ‘Universitaria Destacada’ (Costa Rica).
Her music is closely related to cyberfeminism and feminism; for example, ‘A woman of no importance (Cybernetics Oratorium)’, according to the Bandcamp webpage on which it was released, is about: An elderly woman who decides to burn all of her possessions (i.e., her memories) and to start all over. A girl who is kidnapped and murdered. A cyborg or robot who is subject to sexual and domestic slavery, becomes aware of herself and then rebels through pain as her weapon for freedom. These are the three main characters of this oratorium, which concludes with a requiem in memory of composer Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016).
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Susan Campos-Fonseca’s musical career started early in her childhood, her first approach to experimental music occurring when she was just 11 years old—the time when she started to be mainly interested in piano and the possibilities for experimentation that it offers, as she states: it was the first technology for which I really had a fascination. She also received her education in music school and graduated in orchestral direction, after that I dedicated myself to composition, although my first explorations in musical composition happened when I was 11 years old with my piano teacher Marvin Camacho, who is a prolific and influential composer here in Costa Rica. Then I dedicated more to orchestral conducting and later, through a scholarship, I specialised in musicology. Within musicology, although I have addressed different areas, one of the lines that has interested me the most is that of experimental sound creation in Latin America, specifically that created by women about which I have written several publications.
When describing her musical work, she says it is a question of constant exploration and research. She proposes noise: as a principle of epidemic/epistemic disobedience, as a builder of knowledge and wisdom based on saturation, of the ‘chaosmosis’ of contingent ideas, contradictory and accumulated by violence, destruction, resentment, anger … Noise as epistemic disobedience before the ‘Harmony’ and the ‘Logos’ of the Eurocentric West, white, Christian, phalogocentric, colonizing. Noise as a memory of resilience, of audible worlds that still resist and survive. Noise as a manifestation of interior coloniality, when we use indigenous voices to decolonize us. (Campos-Fonseca, 2019)
She states: In general terms, I believe that a large part of the exploration I have done is linked to searching for a decolonial technological culture. I am interested in knowing not so much about how female artists use technological means facilitated by science, but the way in which what we [women] produce has the possibility to transform how science is thought and done, and how technology is designed nowadays, I think that my interest is mainly there. The search for a decolonial technological culture coming from the activism of Latin American female creators that uses different types of technology, our intellectual, creative and political production.
Technology is a great part of her music and academic work. The tools she uses in her compositions may involve classical instruments as well as computer software. She takes into account what the other artists involved in her pieces are going to use in order to decide what she includes, and considers that each project is a technological research project; when I choose the tools I also choose them as part of a research process. Collaborating with others is one of her main interests, so it is pertinent to consider her perspective on how women have claimed and appropriated sectors such as technology and music in which stereotypes and under-representation prevail.
As it has been for many Latin American female composers, her experience with gender issues has not developed without obstacles in both her field of work and her country: Costa Rica has evolved in a rather complicated environment since, as she says, It is a world that is very much still dominated by male socialisation communities, although there is activism from some women in this field who have obviously done a fantastic job like Jessica Gamboa, with whom I continue to work. To me, the work of Feminoise Latin America has been fundamental, although I think that my gender activism is quite versatile, I do not think that I am in favour of a single line of activism within gender studies, I am always open to research and to knowing about different types of perspectives.
Feminoise Latin America is a virtual community, a unique initiative of its kind started by both Susan and Argentinian Maia Koenig in 2010. The first stage of this community evolved as a record label called Sisters Triangla, which looked to disseminate the work of Latin American female musicians through the release of several compilations. These included pieces that involved the use not only of a wide variety of technology and compositional strategies, but also of music genres and styles. The second stage of Sisters Triangla was its development into a virtual community called Feminoise Latin America, which from a gender perspective inclined towards cyberfeminism by exploring the relationship between women, technology and the internet, and then grew and transformed into several other local communities that led members to meet face to face and organise meetings, concerts, workshops and talks. In 2018, Feminoise held their largest meeting yet in Argentina, where dozens of artists from all over Latin America met and created several other communities and networks. All with a common objective: to raise awareness and the visibility of the work of female creators, since it not only involves music but also other forms of art such as literature, performance, painting and live-coded visuals, among others.
This brings the focus towards a very important tool that enabled the development of a community such as Feminoise: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their most widespread form, that is, social networks and virtual communities. During the last decade, as mentioned in the report of the United Nations Fourth International Conference on Women: advances in information technologies have facilitated a global communications network that transcends national boundaries and has had an impact in public policy, private attitudes and behaviour. […] More women are involved in the communications sector, but few have attained positions at the decision-making level. (UN, 1995)
For women creators, social networks and virtual communities have acquired the role of an alternative means to traditional mass media (television, newspapers or radio), and virtual communities are used to create synergies with others and ‘to see what is unfair, invisible, patriarchal and to offer alternative imaginaries and practices that change those inequalities, stereotypes, gender discrimination’ (Gender and Tech Resources, 2017).
As mass media, especially social networks, and technologies have been dominated by men for a long time, cyberfeminism has emerged as one of the available ways to counteract that situation. In this sense, virtual communities represent, on the one hand, ‘a new way of facing reality and of building new knowledge by making women active participants in epistemological discourse, allowing them to emerge from invisibility as subjects’ (Palacios Ibañez, 2009), and, on the other, a search for ‘building community knowledge, collective knowledge’ (Fischetti, 2016). In this respect, Susan Campos-Fonseca states that: definitely virtual communities, with all the contingencies they may entail, are undoubtedly our space, a place where we can reimagine ourselves; I think it is a process.
A virtual community is a ‘group of people who interact, learn together, build relationships and, during the process, develop a sense of belonging and commitment. In this process, they also build relationships based on respect and trust and feed the sense of a common history and their own identity’ (Sanz Martos, 2011). Latin American female composers through cyberfeminism, which for the development of this text is ‘an activism linked to the experimental creation of sound artists and composers’ (Campos-Fonseca, 2016), are reimagining themselves; building their own identity and history; and achieving contact networks, dissemination of their work and greater visibility. However, as Campos-Fonseca states: There are different ways of understanding visibility and inclusion and unfortunately, or positively, it seems to me that speaking of Latin American women as a community is also complicated. I have been more in favour of an activism similar to that of Feminoise Latin America, which I find formidable, and of the different groups or communities that have been brewing.
Women involved in experimental music in Latin America create and adhere to virtual communities (which often develop into face-to-face communities) on Facebook, which may implicitly or explicitly be related to cyberfeminism: ‘a practice of cooperation between women, machines, and new technologies’ (Campos-Fonseca, 2016). This cooperation has led to great progress not only for creators but also for women in general, since they now are able to freely use a very powerful means towards their liberation and visibilisation and connect in many ways with other women with the same objectives.
In relation to music, the latter also fosters the historical recording of the evolution of music creation by Latin American women, which was invisible until recently since we generally only learnt about male composers. This has led to the development of new generations who envision greater possibilities and opportunities, and the development of feminism with its various branches; as Campos-Fonseca says: I believe that we are creating our own spaces. In relation to traditional media, it seems to me that there have been festivals, meetings, radio programmes and podcasts; there has also been coverage in the press, but focused on specific people or groups. We are strengthening a network.
Taking advantage of alternative platforms to mass media—which have not worked as effective tools for dissemination since they are economically inaccessible for female creators or because they have lost relevance in front of social networks—is a way to start undertaking actions to compensate for the under-representation of Latin American women as creators. This can help end the stereotype of Latin American women as passive participants or secondary actors, taking into account that, as Campos-Fonseca proposes: Perhaps a virtual community is something that we weave at an individual level; we should evaluate exactly which priorities we have, with whom we connect, why, with what kind of works we have a special connection.