Ximena Alarcón-Díaz

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations. She composes immersive listening collective experiences and creates Interfaces for Relational Listening, exploring people’s sense of place and telepresence for the emergence of aural territories of memory and emotion. She has a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation (DMU), and became a Deep Listening® certified tutor, mentored by Pauline Oliveros. Through postdoctoral awards she created Sounding Underground (Leverhulme Trust 2007-2009); the telematic improvisations Networked Migrations (CRiSAP, 2011-2017); and the embodied telematic system INTIMAL (Marie Skłodowska Curie IF 2017-2019). Awardee of art funds she has created: INTIMAL App© (The Studio Recovery Fund 2021), the surround sound installation UNRAVELLING/DESENREDANDO (Immersive Audio Network 2023; Four Nations International Fund, 2024), and the installation Huellas de Aire (MAMM, 2024). She teaches at the Center for Deep Listening (RPI), and is Coordinator of Postgraduate Arts Degrees at the Universidad de Antioquia.
http://ximenaalarcon.net

Zuleika Lebow

Zuleika Lebow is an artist, writer and educator from London. Utilising installations, sculpture and photography, she creates spaces that facilitate dialogue about the relationship between identity, social paradigms and myth-making. As Course Tutor on MA Applied Imagination at Central St Martins, Lebow empowers students to become creative change-makers in the world.

Photo by Jolly Thompson

SARA MOHR-PIETSCH

Sara Mohr-Pietsch is a music broadcaster, writer and curator. Her mission is to create welcoming spaces for listening to music, as a way of better understanding ourselves, each other and the world around us. Sara is best known as a presenter on BBC Radio 3, where she hosts Music Map and the award-winning Night Tracks. She has also fronted Breakfast Music Matters, the BBC Proms and the podcast series Composers’ Rooms (nominated for a Prix Europa). Sara served as Artistic Director of Dartington Music Summer School & Festival (2020-2023), and devised Open Ear for BBC Radio 3, a new music showcase which played the BBC Proms, Tate Modern and LSO St Luke’s. Her writing includes articles on music and gender for The Guardian, Huffington Post and BBC Music Magazine. She is currently working on a new book. 

Photo by Lydia Goldblatt

Film screening: 'City of a Million Dreams'

USA | 2021 | 90 minutes

Famous the world over, jazz funerals have origins shrouded in mystery. Filmed over twenty-two years, City of a Million Dreams explores race relations at a tearing time in American society. Burial traditions train a lens on the unique and resilient culture of New Orleans. City of a Million Dreams draws from the 2018 book of the same title by Jason Berry.

Deb Cotton, an African American and observant Jew, leaves “hard-hearted Hollywood” for New Orleans, and becomes a chronicler of the parading clubs spawned by 19th century burial societies. Her zeal for the city grows as she becomes a blogger for Gambit Weekly, adopting the handle “Big Red Cotton.” As Deb explores her adopted culture, Dr. Michael White, a prolific clarinetist and New Orleans native, plays “the widow’s wail” on his clarinet, a cry of lamentation in the funeral marches. White’s transcendent music also includes joyous peals for the soul’s cutting-loose, which happens when the band leaves the cemetery, followed by dancers in what New Orleanians call “the second line.” Risen in the ranks of brass bands, White, too, is on a journey of self-discovery, seeking clues about his ancestor who played at the dawn of jazz. White says of jazz funerals: “For someone dealing with American racism and trying to figure out your place in this life…you can be transformed into another world that really sets you free.”

Funerals unfold as caravans of memory, shaping White’s quest and Cotton’s epiphanies. New Orleans burial customs evolve as people of different tongues and colors reach the city, surviving floods, fires, war, political violence, civil rights struggles, and hurricanes. The film follows the French town’s evolution with a stunning recreation of African burial choreographies by enslaved people, honoring ancestral memory on a field called Congo Square. The resistance drama of danced memory carries across time, gathering force as as black men march as Mardi Gras Indians in one the film’s most powerful funeral sequences. As African dances merge with the funeral processions of European marching bands, the fusion of the ring and the line gives shape to jazz music, and an archetype of the city’s diverse society.

https://cityofamilliondreams.com/about/