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Digital Musics & Sound Art Auszeichnung - Award of Distinction 2021

A Father's Lullaby. Site-Responsive Sound Installations

Rashin Fahandej
A Father ’s Lullaby is an ongoing series of public interventions, immersive installations, community co-creation workshops, and a location-based participatory audio augmented reality platform.  A Father ’s Lullaby is a “Poetic Movement” where art and technology mobilize a plethora of voices while utilizing public places and virtual spaces to ignite a more inclusive dialogue to effect social change. Intimate interviews, songs, and lullabies offer poetic meditations on the spaces of love and trauma, presence and absence, and the power of personal memories to interrogate the structural violence of mass incarceration in the United States.  

A Father's Lullaby highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and its direct impact on children, women, and lower income communities.  The project is centered on marginalized voices of absent fathers and invites all men to participate by singing lullabies and sharing memories of childhood. Explored through the space of love and intimacy, the project is being developed with community members as creative collaborators.  

The installations are site responsive. The process is a collaboration with the immediate communities in local spaces. The installations consisted of two layers of sound. A series of compositions created from lullabies contributed by fathers from the immediate community, and a set of motion activated sound stations; audiences presence prompts multitudes of stories to unfold; audio documentaries created in conversation with fathers on federal probation. Installations are an open call to the community through a participatory location-based contributory audio augmented reality platform, that can be experienced online through a map and in physical space or by walking the neighborhoods as an augmented audio app. The map creates a sonic representation of memories, lullabies, visions, and desires, co-creating new collective social memories.

Links: http://www.rashinfahandej.com/selected-projects#/a-fathers-lullaby/, https://fatherslullaby.org/
Collaborators Audio:
Sound design: Krista Dragomer 
Sound design and mixing: Christian Gentry  
Location-based participatory audio mobile app: Halsey Burgund 
Basson: Lecolion Washington 
Cello: Takayo Lowery  
Saxophone: Daryl Lowery  
Didgeridoo: poetry: Charles Coe 
Drum: Cornel Coley 
Vocal: Monica Spencer, Wanda Perry-Josephs 
Poetry: L’Merchie Frazier, LaToya Tiffany Spencer 

Collaborators Video:
Stop motion animation: Sarah Jenkins  
Editors: Nick Nerolien, Alex Ezorsky   
Videographers: Jonathan Turner, Lizandro Segora, Afshin Saadi  
Volumetric post-production: Filip Baba  
Haptic team: Xingyu Zou, Toru Nakanishi, Anthony Montuori, Hisham Bedri 
Dance: Fridien Tchoukoua  

 Community collaborators: Kevin Lockhart, Micco Lockhart, Richard Hatcher, Cheryl Pasley, Christopher Pasley, Ronald Scott, Shawn Keefe, John Walsh, Keith Huston, Eugene Bly, Jim Infantino, Augustin, Santiago Hernaiz, Efrain Rivero, Jose Aponte, Edwin, Colin Gaumont, Eladio Alvarez, Drew Carpenter, James Bush, Michael Lewis, Leroy Robinson, Michael P. Dellea, Matthew Hamilton, Morris Robinson, Tyshaun Perryman, and many others 

Partners: Boston Mayor’s Office, MIT Open Documentary Lab, Institute of Contemporary Arts Boston, MIT Co-Creation Studio, Boston Center for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Framingham City Council, ThoughtWork Arts, Scatter VR, U.S. Federal Probation office Massachusetts, Boston Mayor’s office of Returning Citizen, American Arts Incubator,  Emerson College, Engagement Lab.
Rashin Fahandej (US) is an artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor of emerging media at Emerson College. Her projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and community co-creation to ignite social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. Her projects are supported by Boston Mayor’s Office, Boston Center for the Arts, ThoughtWork Arts, Scatter VR, Mass Cultural Council, and American Arts Incubator-Austria.  She is the recipient of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Boston’s Foster Prize.