Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván (2025) Beyond the Spaces and Registers of Flamenco-coloniality? The Ineffability and Cosmosonorous Emergences of "home-place-world". Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 21, Nº2

Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 21, No. 2 (2025) ISSN: 1557-2935 <http://liminalities.net/21-2/home-place-world.pdf> Beyond the Spaces and Registers of Flamenco-coloniality? The Ineffability and Cosmosonorous Emergences of “home-place-world” 1 Iván Periáñez Bolaño This text examines, expands and complements some of the issues explored in the audiobook, Cosmosonorities [Cosmosonoridades]. The following pages point to reflections, possibilities and availabilities experienced alongside other bodies, knowledges and practices localised in the Global South. The main idea that permeates both formats re-cognises Gitano-song 2 as a “Cosmosonorous Epistemology of Feeling.” In other words, Gitano-song is more than music, it refers to a body of specific teachings, knowledges, practices, spiritualities, rationalities, family inter-genealogies, agents, and forms of validation. Music is the outcome, in this case, of existing being feeling with the Romanipen (collective Roma values and identities). From this starting point, the following selections revolve around four topics of interest. The first one establishes the beginning of the contacts and transversal themes that have been treated both in the sonorous and the written format. Then, we will dwell very briefly on the senses and meanings that can be derived from the term “cosmosonority.” Next, we will propose some considerations about our understanding of the “double negation of flamenco” in relation to Gitano-song. Thereafter, we will go into some of the characteristics and presences of “homeplace-world,” understood here not as a collection of spaces but rather as relations Iván Periáñez Bolaño is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville. He received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award in Social Sciences and the Award for Research Merit in Social Sciences. Among his most recent publications: Un día entre los días. Habla, cuenta, canta el Pueblo Gitano I (Madrid: Akal, 2025); Cosmosonoridades: cantegitano y canción-gyu. Epistemologías del Sentir (Madrid: Akal, 2023). 1 Translated by Carlos van Tongeren. 2 Throughout this text, the word ‘Gitano-song’ is hyphenated to convey the intrinsic relationship that this body of song styles holds with Gitano families and culture for the author; as well as the fact that “song” is seen as more than “music” but also as emerging out of the shared histories, knowledges, values and memories of Gitano culture [translator note]. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 2 that are articulated through other logics, attributes, and dynamics dissociated from the theoretical, methodological, and cognitive frameworks produced and projected by flamenco, by art and by aesthetics. Then, and following the experiences of this case study, we will leave open the conversation in acknowledgment of some of the possibilities and impossibilities prompted by the format of the audiobook. “Triin trin, triin trin…they knock on the door, I don’t know who may be there…” 3 At the end of 2022, the coordinators of this special issue invited me to participate in the dossier with a text and an audiobook. Their interest was sparked by the reflections that resulted from the readings and contents that appear in the essay Cosmosonoridades: cante-gitano y canción-gyu. Epistemologías del sentir. 4 I accepted the invitation, happy with the opportunity to co-create a different type of production that I had not previously experienced in these contexts. I have to admit that co-participating in a project like the one that will be presented here has been a real challenge and a new experience of learning and doing. After the first conversation, and the following ones, we started outlining the central themes that would be amenable to appear in both formats, the audiobook and written text. In the initial discussion prior to our first meetings, we identified a few interesting questions to be explored further. These can be summarised as follows: how do Romani bodies, knowledges, and practices interact with, work against, and resist the dominant sensorial and cognitive regimes that reflect the current coloniality of power/being/feeling/knowledge, in this case through hegemonic forms of flamenco, art and aesthetics? What artistic and academic formats can help make the heritage of Gitano-song re-cognisable alongside its loci of enunciation? Should the attempt to capture or register the cosmosonorous and aesthesic 5 ineffability and incommensurability of Gitano-song through 3 Lyrics of a song in martinete style. 4 Iván Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades: cante-gitano y canción gyu. Epistemologías del sentir (Akal, 2023). 5 Following Rolando Vázquez and Miriam Barrera Contreras, decolonial “aesthesis” refers to our different ways of relating to the world and “worlding” through the senses. The term is an alternative to the concept of “aesthetics” since it envisions a liberation of the senses from the aesthetic parameters of Western modernity. Rolando Vázquez and Miriam Barrera, “Aesthesis decolonial y tiempos relacionales. Una entrevista a Rolando Vázquez,” Calle 14: Revista de investigación en el campo del arte 11, no. 18 (2016), Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 3 written formats be seen as an attempt at colonial subjugation? Can the format of the audiobook serve to convey those vernacular knowledges without losing, erasing, disentangling them from their “ontologico-cultural” foundations and anchorages; from the “sonorous trace of colonial trauma,” from their effectivity as a “cognitive antidote”? 6 How can the inherited rhythmic memories, the localised hearings and silences anchored in the sonorous knowledges of the Global South be relevant to decolonise the preeminence of spatiality, of vision and visuality, of modern-colonial aesthetics and art? To what extent does the digital register contribute to the displacement of these vernacular knowledges, or to their relocation and strategic resignification to facilitate “global social and cognitive justice” 7 ? The previous questions do not exhaust the pathways and lines of thinking that were discussed; rather, they represent a series of preliminary thoughts with which we started discussing and rethinking the textures and warps with which to seam together the relevant words, rhythmic memories and sounds. Therefore, here you will not find one (single) voice reading a book from beginning to end or conveying some of its literal meanings. They don’t read; the voices and bodies converse and listen, sing, play and perform rhythm, feel, exchange and re-cognise. You will not find any sounds that were tidied up or extracted from the spontaneous textures in which they emerged, but rather a collection of multiple sonorities emitted by bodies that were not following a script. You will be able to hear and read how the cosmosonorous emergence of “home-place-world” summons and fuses times and temporalities dissociated from Eurocentric modernity. The motivations to explain what, why and how words were said, epistemico-musical layers were fused, the emergence of memories-presents was verbalised, the semantic and semiotic implications of silences and hearings were https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.c14.2016.1.a06. Also see Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text: Periscope (2013), https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonialwoundsdecolonial-healings/. 6 Iván Periáñez-Bolaño, “Comunicando márgenes a través de la música en el Mediterráneo: Flamenco y Ghiwane, encuentros y emergencias” (PhD thesis, Universidad de Sevilla, 2019a); Iván Periáñez-Bolaño, “Músicas del Sur global, saberes y prácticas del sentir. ¿Un lugar común para la resistencia y la reexistencia?”, in Estéticas descoloniales desde el Sur. Arte, memorias y cuerpos, ed. Karina Andrea Bidaseca and Maria Paula Guttierrez Meneses (CLACSO, 2021), https://www.clacso.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/V2_Poetica-erotica_N2.pdf; Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 7 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Duke University Press, 2018). Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 4 emphasised, among other processes that appear in the audio, reflect our attempts at expressing ourselves in the exteriorities of uni-versality, univocality, outside of binarisms, power hierarchies and monoculturalism. Specifically, the aforementioned processes confront anti-Gitano attitudes and the “double negation exercised by flamenco over Gitano-song.” Frankly, in these contexts and for these formats, as far as Gitano-song or flamenco are concerned we believe that this may be a different or innovative type of creativity. The audiobook (more clearly identifiable as an artistic work) captures a selection of sonorous-embodied moments, fragments and encounters produced on 21 and 22 June 2023 in Factoría Cultural (Seville). 8 Moreover, the audio contains a variety of sonorous, vocal, temporal and social layers, showing the secondary role of the spaces in regard to the relations 9 contained and established by the cosmosonorities. This text, for its part, is a supplement that should be read alongside the audio. If possible, it should be read slowly, calmly and following the rhythmic pace of Gitano-song; read it listening; read it dialoguing, read it singing alongside others. Cosmosonorit(y/ies) Elsewhere I have dealt in depth with the concept of “Cosmosonority” and the expression “Cosmosonorous Epistemologies of Feeling.” 10 For the first term, we will discuss some of the ideas underpinning its implications, in such manner that they can help us contextualise the senses and meanings that 8 Factoría Cultural is a building in public ownership funded part with European funding (80%) and part by Seville’s city council (20%). Its installations are suitable for various purposes, such as: a large auditorium for concerts and other types of performances; workshop spaces; rehearsal rooms; recording studios; conference rooms; and spaces for the exhibition of paintings, works of photography and film screenings. It is a symbolical space, as it is the only one of its kind located in the “frontier-neighbourhood” of Polígono Sur in the south of Seville. For Gitano families and the local neighbourhood association, as for all local inhabitants, this is a space of conflict. Therefore, the strategies used by these agents hover between critical stances toward internal and external management, attempts at presenting proposals for previously unexplored possibilities, and participating in different activities and processes carried out or organised by Factoría Cultural. See the following website: https://icas.sevilla.org/espacios/factoria-cultural. On “frontierneigbourhoods,” see Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades, 179-81. 9 At the end of this conversation we will add an extensive list of the collaborations that were captured in the audiobook. 10 Periáñez-Bolaño, “Comunicando”; Periáñez-Bolaño, “Músicas”; PeriáñezBolaño, Cosmosonoridades. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 5 create the conditions for the emergence of “home-place-world,” 11 the emergence of Gitano-song beyond the aesthetic and artistic criteria and the dynamics of cultural (de)heritagisation of flamenco. 12 Thus, we state the following: sounds have existed in the World, in the Cosmos, on Earth, before humans were there. This is not hard to acknowledge. Up to this point, we are not talking about music. However, alongside such — unintentional?— sonorities produced by inorganic matter, it can be said that a number of animals communicate themselves and ritualise their lives through the organisation of sounds, vibrations, intensities, rhythms or by using other elements of the environment to generate them. In other words, they organise sound. This reflection allows for an expansion of the meanings and possibilities of one of the most cited definitions of “music” in the field of Anthropology: “humanly organised sound.” 13 Moreover, the expression “cosmosonorities” suggests that sounds existed on the planet before humans. Thus, it is not far-fetched to think that what people and “culturalontologies” 14 have done and do is to organise those sounds of the world, the cosmos, the earth; each and every one does so in a unique manner in line with their experiences, ontologies and historical trajectories. Thus, following this idea, we can ask what it is that engenders or produces the distinctive particularity of all musics, in such manner that it becomes possible to recognise them individually. When looking for a possible answer, it is reasonable to re-think the fact that the organisation of sounds in one way rather than another, in line with each cultural-ontology, corresponds with its established trajectories and loci of enunciation. Since we are and feel in a particular way we also sing, dance, play and perform rhythm in a particular way; not the other way around, since thinking about it in a different order is a synecdoche of and an inclination towards the reproduction of colonial violence. What the phrase by actress Alba Flores expresses and feels to us seems more than adequate to bring home this earlier point: “We are because they were, and they will be because we are.” 15 Romano Ustipen! Opre Roma! 11 Periáñez-Bolaño, “Comunicando”; Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 12 Iván Periáñez-Bolaño, “Discursos y representaciones locales sobre la patrimonialización del flamenco en Andalucía, un proceso multinivel,” Revista de Antropología Social 28, no. 1 (2019b): 71-93. 13 John Blacking, How Musical is Man? (Alianza Editorial, 2010), 29. 14 Periáñez-Bolaño, “Comunicando”; Periáñez-Bolaño, “Discursos”; PeriáñezBolaño, “Músicas”; Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 15 In my case, I heard this phrase when it was voiced by the co-editor of Altramuz Editorial, the illustrator and writer Sandra Carmona Durán. See Sandra Carmona Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 6 Here we can raise several questions about the criteria and premises commonly reproduced in Eurocentric modernity. For instance, we can question the accuracy and usefulness produced and reproduced by some of the postmodern mantras of scientific and aesthetic-artistic monoculturalism, as reflected by expressions such as world music, uni-versal music, uni-versal flamenco, folkloric music, popular music, ethnic music, hybrid or mestizo music, among other terms that diminish, deny or erase the pluriversity of worlds that we co-inhabit in this common-home. They all stem from and reproduce a re-signified evolutionism. Please allow us to question the assumption that there is no analytical value in suggesting that the musics produced around the world can be played, can encounter one another, enter in contact and dialogue since they are all parts of the sounds that were already there (we insist) before humans. It is more complex to elucidate, without erasing without denying without folklorising without homogeneising without commodifying bodies and knowledges, why every human group gives meaning to and organises the sounds of the world one way rather than another. Another confusion or error contained by such expressions and the ideologies that support them is the transposition of biological and phenotypical processes to socio-cultural dimensions, processes, dynamics and factors. The racialisation and commodification of bodies and knowledges is what underlies the terms highlighted in italics above. By the same token, another flawed assumption lacking in complexity and critical value is to re-think that when two or more musical styles enter in contact, conversation or dialogue, they are reflective of a consolidated form of interculturality: this is another mantra of Eurocentric postmodernism, which tends to confound (intentionally or not) multiculturality with interculturality. Although some may be bothered by this and may want one equal world (which is not the same as a world of justice and equality that also acknowledges differences and particularities), the existence of diversity, ontologico-cultural and identitarian plurality is not something that requires extensive debate. However, interculturality is not part of the foundational or genealogical parameters of Eurocentric modernity, of Western-centrism, of public policies, of art and aesthetics; nor is it part, harsh as this may seem, of the interests that (de-)heritagised flamenco elicits. The term “Cosmosonority” is dissociated from these categories, expressions, Durán, “La visibilidad lésbica en el pueblo gitano,” Gitanos, Radio Nacional de España 5, 25 November, 2023, audio, 56:19, https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/gitanos/visibilidad-lesbica-pueblogitano/7018809/. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 7 dynamics, and attributes; of its agents, methodologies and rationalities. Cosmosonority enunciates, feels, expresses and coexists outside of the realm of purity, outside of a realm where singularities are dissolved to normalise or unify diversity (what if everything is made pure, hybrid or mestizo...?), outside of monoculturalism, binary and hierarchical thinking, racialisation, the dislocation of knowledges and practices, the commodification of bodies, the “territorialisation of knowledges and identities.” 16 Cosmosonority facilitates the emergence of the singularities that confirm the diversity and pluri-versity of worlds (what if everything is made pure, hybrid or mestizo...?); cosmosonority re-cognises that vernacular musics localised in the Global South correspond with knowledges, inherited patrimonies and “ontologico-cultural” creativities, with “Cosmosonorous Epistemologies of Feeling”; cosmosonority directs the pre-eminence of aesthetic and artistic criteria towards the solidity of the epistemic and aesthesic foundations and anchorages that the musics of the Global South, including Gitano-song, produce, safeguard and transmit. Cosmosonority enunciates itself in other parameters detached from the standardisation of perceptions, emotions, feelings, and cognitions. The “double negation of flamenco” 17 Following Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “colonialism is a structure, an ethos [...] that reproduces itself day after day in its oppressions and silencings [...] Colonial oppression has not ended.” 18 Using this idea and its correspondences, one of the most explicit ways in which the multiple violences associated with the contemporary resignifications of colonialism/globalism manifest and project themselves, has to do with the so-called public policies of cultural (de)heritagisation. In their deepest and most complex sense, these policies are part of the established criteria for art and aesthetics; or to put it differently, of one specific and domineering (and considered as the only true and valid) way of perceiving, feeling, projecting, understanding, expressing and imposing the comprehension/interpretation 16 Iván Periáñez-Bolaño, “Flamenco, ‘zona de contacto’ colonial,” in Desarmar las opresiones del capitalismo desde las Epistemologías del Sur, ed. María Paula Meneses, Karina Bidaseca and Ángeles Castaño (McGraw-Hill Interamericana de España, in press); Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 17 We have discussed the “double negation of flamenco” and the triangular colonial articulation between “cosmovision-art-aesthetics” in Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades and Periáñez-Bolaño, “Flamenco.” 18 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen. Miradas ch´ixi desde la historia andina (Tinta Limón, 2015), 25. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 8 of the world, which originates in eighteenth-century Europe. The public policies of cultural (de)heritagisation applied to Gitano-song and RomaniGitano culture, its rules, agents, motivations and dynamics, are part of colonialism in its actual resignifications; of capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy. Even with its localist and globalist overtones, independently of where these absences and negations are located, the interest that they conceal is sustained by at least three central axes that in large part sustain the violence inflicted to the vernacular productions and creativities localised in the Global South. One, “internal colonialism” 19 needed for the construction, reproduction and projection of the narratives, representations, and identities of the State. Second, the theft, expropriation or deidentification of the ontologico-cultural foundations of said vernacular productions and creativities to clear the way for their commodification or folklorisation and for their exploitation in delocalised, touristified, musealised, gentrified spaces. Third, in relation to the previous points, the commodification and racialisation of the bodies, knowledges, and practices associated with globalist multiculturalism separate the productions from the Global South from their vernacular loci of enunciation and facilitate the erasure and silencing of these productions’ ontological, epistemic, historical, and political anchorages and foundations. Within this framework, and when re-thought and re-constructed in this manner, flamenco contains both an affirmation and a negation towards Gitano-song; or rather the affirmation and negation act as a double negation. The affirmation refers to the fact that for the hegemonic agents of flamenco, Gitano-song is only acceptable as an object, as a spectacle or as music (ethnic, uni-versal, Andalusian, popular) for museums, for academies and universities, to be stolen/heritagised or folklorised. Said affirmation, its rules and practices, as well as its associated consequences, act together and in a relevant way to shape the ignorance and the ontologico-cultural epistemic aesthesic spiritual inter-genealogical erasure that sustains and alongside which Gitano-song originates, is safeguarded and transmitted. We have hereby also stated the negation —this type of flamenco invalidates, erases, weakens, colonises, steals, confuses, alienates or deceives those who are unaware of the vernacular loci of enunciation of Gitano-song. That is to say, flamenco silences or does not acknowledge that Gitano-song is more 19 Pablo González Casanova, “Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo,” América Latina 6, no. 3 (1963): 15-32; Ángeles Castaño Madroñal, “Colonialidad interna y europeidad en la política para la inmigración en Andalucía,” Revista Andaluza de Antropología 10 (2016): 192-222; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch´ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Tinta Limón, 2018). Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 9 than music, it is a “cosmosonorous epistemology of feeling”; a body of learnings, knowledges, practices, rationalities and wisdoms, a patrimony transmitted by/located in the Gitano families who live together in Andalusia, Spain, and other parts of the world. It is our histories and temporalities, ancestors and elderly, families and inter-genealogies, our languages and ways of life that produce this distinctive mode of expression. Gitano-song, as a body of knowledge that manifests itself live through song, dance and guitar playing, is an ontologico-cultural realisation of the Roma-Gitano People, of the Romanipen. 20 This is being denied, repressed, silenced and erased. The attempts at concealing these presences do not occur in a vacuum or unintentionally. Beyond the purely musical issue, acknowledging the musics of the Global South as specific ontological, epistemic and aesthesic creativities means moving the debate towards the decolonisation of the pillars that continue to sustain Eurocentric modernity, its configurations, but also its historical and contemporary forms of violence. Flamenco, as constructed by colonial agents, institutions, and dynamics, produces, supports and reproduces a “double negation” of Gitano-song, of the Romani cultural-ontology, of Roma-Gitano people and culture all over the world and not just in Andalusia or Spain (which is another mantra of gitanismo/ antigitanismo 21 and nacional-flamenquismo 22 ). “Smells of my grandmother...” 23 : Home-place-world, selected notes 20 The historian Sarah Carmona has proposed interesting considerations about the Romanipen in “Identité versus épistémologie romani. Entre essentialisme et universalisme,” Parti des Indigènes de la République, 14 March, 2014, https://indigenesrepublique.fr/identite-versus-epistemologie-romani-entre-essentialisme-etuniversalisme/. 21 Gitanismo refers to a set of pro-Gitano attitudes, whereas antigitanismo reflects anti-Gitano hatred. Both positions have existed at different points in Spanish history; for instance, gitanismo was elevated to an artistic or intellectual project by artists such as Federico García Lorca. In the context of this article, gitanismo is considered as the flip side of antigitanismo as the former is also associated with the romanticisation and simplification of Gitano culture and, therefore, with the erasure of the latter’s vernacular loci of enunciation [translator note.] 22 Nacional-flamenquismo is a term that was coined by the journalist Francisco Almazán and is a variation on the name of the official ideology of the Franco dictatorship (nacionalcatolicismo). It refers to the elevation of flamenco and proflamenco stances to tools of cultural ideology and diplomacy by Franco’s regime [translator note.] 23 Translation of “Huele a mi agüela,” a song with a religious subtext in bulería style written by the journalist, writer, and composer Antonio Ortega. See the bibliography and further recommended resources. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 16 answers. In this way, apart from the previous ones, we also listed, developed, and applied the following ones with multilocalised experiences: “Who translates us? Why do they translate us? What do they translate? How do they translate? With what aim do they translate us? For whom do they translate? Where do they translate us?” 45 We insist: these questions, like the contents and meanings selected to address them, emerge out of the localised acts of dialoguing and co-existing between-knowledges and between-bodies localised in the Global South. These were the relations that were established as a condition of possibility for the emergence of “co-translation and directed translation”: the first, cotranslation, comprises what, how, with whom, when... we talk, speak, listen, feel, learn, express, sing, perform rhythm, dance, belong, we celebrate in our homes, festivities and families; the second, directed translation, establishes and selects what, who, why, for what, how, when, and where we are going to translate (or not) our vernacular knowledges, learnings, rationalities and expressivities. 46 Although they have been summarised here, all the aforementioned aspects have been taken into account extensively not only when co-elaborating on this text, but also in the process of coparticipation for the creation of the audiobook. They were set in motion when the coordinators of this special issue invited me/us to participate by co-featuring in a format of this kind: we rejected the personal and individualised format of the interview; we rejected the reading of my book Cosmosonoridades; we parted ways with audio-visual hegemony; we attached ourselves to orality and to “extended listening”; we opted for the coparticipation and collaboration of/with other representative agents; we opted for the multivocality and primordial multipresence of “rhythmic memories in the present continuous”; we suggested a symbolical meeting place and site of struggle (Factoría Cultural) for the families and Gitano associations that live in Seville’s Polígono Sur; we also met outside of the hegemonic spaces and relations, alongside different co-protagonists we worked on the possibilities and impossibilities of the recording format in our homes; we selected the contents and their appearances; we decided on the rhythms, on compás, the sonorities and silences; among other things. This text and the audiobook are exercises in “co-translation and directed translation.” We insist, prior to their (possible) publication both formats were listened to, read, and discussed in the process leading up to their completion. 45 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades, 59. 46 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades, 35-92. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 17 Nevertheless, the audiobook and text are undoubtedly two ways of registering and subjecting the acts of being present, communicating and representing. They are formats and methodologies, media, and relations, playing fields with their own rules and agents. Another matter to be explored is whether both are colonial artefacts and strategies, and, if so, to ask ourselves whether it is possible to diminish their impact, to revert them, to burst through the cracks of their logics and attributes. This refers to matters or dimensions of an ontological, epistemic, material and political nature. All of them were contemplated from within the motivations and selections agreed between the voices and bodies that co-protagonise both formats (audiobook and text), with the intention of promoting and projecting “narratives of recovery, reparation and justice.” 47 Or rather, attenuating or bursting through the colonial violences that usually sustain and are reproduced by these media of comprehension and erasure are a primordial or basic component of our decolonising intentions in these spaces. Our intentions and motivations do not only recur to critique, but they gesture especially toward the existence of alternatives to the alternatives. Thus, one of the questions to be discussed is perhaps whether these presences and actions are indeed localised together with their loci of enunciation. Contrary to individual authorship, we repeat that what can be found in this audiobook and in this text corresponds with emergences selected and discussed between voices, bodies, and knowledges. This is a first step. We understand that it is not just a minor point of departure or one understood exclusively in a symbolical, reduced or accidental manner. With-meaning, just as these emergences have been arranged in both formats: they indicate and are opposed to colonial dynamics, agents, and mentalities; they are meant not to produce or project a dissection, synecdoche, diachrony, or fixed representation. In any case, acts of attenuation, reversal, bursting through are related in the first instance to the basic fact of not succumbing to the extreme, vital, genocidal (both physical and ontologico-cultural) acts of violence, the forced and continued sterilisation of Roma women, the reduced life expectancy of Roma people, the difficulty of finding decent jobs or housing, of co-existing in a “continuous state of exception.” 48 Without life, without a voice, without basic conditions enabling a decent way of existing and being present, there is no possibility or availability of hope, which is essential for pushing back and bursting through, for recovery, reparation, and justice. Health/life, 47 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 48 Sebijan Fejzula, “The Anti-Roma Europe: Modern ways of disciplining the Roma body in urban spaces,” Revista Direito e Práxis 10, no. 3 (2019): 2099. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 18 freedom and justice, understood in their multiple and situated concretions and experiences, are values intimately related with the Romanipen. Following the above, in any expressive, artistic, communicative or aesthesic manifestation, the how is as important (or even more important) as the what: we take this to be crucial to acknowledge the characteristics of “extended listening.” In vernacular contexts and settings, in “home-placeworld” this is clear, it is part of its possibilities of and dispositions towards existence and contemporaneity. The processes, agents and forms of validation discussed in the previous section are a reduced yet significant sample to reflect on the impossibility of stopping, detaining, or containing them in the act in their totality or completion. Many of these aesthesic processes/states are difficult to express with words or images, and it is even more difficult to detect or insert them into audio-visual formats to facilitate their posterior reproduction. However, in these colonial registers, the copresence in “self-representation in full conscience” 49 together with the Romanipen and with Gitano-song explicitly expresses a greater complexity that requires the what and how to be placed at the same level. Or, if you prefer: of taking seriously the implications of only hearing instead of listening, more even of seeing rather than listening, which is why we chose not to create an audio-visual essay. Listening with others can be a way of not succumbing to individuation or individualism. Listening with others facilitates the re-cognition of our “own and shared ignorances,” 50 as well as of possible ways or agreements to resolve them; the re-cognition not to commodify, project or justify dehumanisation and expropriation; not to mistranslate others or translate them without re-cognising but our own frameworks of thinking and understanding; the re-cognition to detach ourselves from the dialogue or interview, which are methodologies and positions that consolidate the subject/object relation; to approach recording formats and expressive or aesthesic productions through situatedconversations and networks-relations produced through intraand intercultural contact and encounter; 51 not to erase, cleanse or disentangle the ontologico-cultural anchorages and foundations produced, safeguarded and transmitted by Gitano-song, the Romanipen; among other factors that could (not) be conveyed here. Gitano-song, as a ontologico-cultural concretion of the Roma, composed of multiple knowledges, practices, agents and forms of validation, is not amenable to be captured on screen, on tape, through music notation, as a replica or repetition. The smell, tact, pain, 49 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. 50 Santos, El milenio; Santos, The End. 51 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 19 healing, the “cosmosonorous cognitive antidote,” o the “flavour of Gitanosong” as Tío Manuel Morao 52 says, are some of the aesthesic possibilities that such formats cannot offer. There are no formula to detect them, to convey them in their density, measure, and rhythm it is not sufficient to take lessons in music academies or attend festivals or conservatoires. Concerning this point, elsewhere I wrote the following: These are not its media, nor do they correspond with the vernacular forms of validation or with the incommensurability of the connections produced in intimate relations, encounters, and festivities. The attempt at subjugation through writing or the regularisation of sonorous variables through computer programmes used for mathematic and statistical calculation are uncapable of detecting the living criteria of the learnings and knowledges that they try to mechanise, register, store, recover and reproduce; it doesn’t have a smell or taste, it doesn’t breathe, it is synchronous it doesn’t have a memory, it is not creative, it is repetitive. They cannot encompass the totality and fullness of life, the foundation of Gitano-song, of the Romanipen. Hence the impossibility of containing or re-cognising them through the written formats for musical annotation-registration in the West, as the performance of every Gitano-song is unrepeatable due to the convergence of ineffable and inapprehensible aspects of communication and expression related to the cadences of life, the rationalities, the temporalities, the coordination of silences, the situated-conversations and the memories transmitted in homesplaces-worlds. [...] they don’t appear in their fullness, or they may appear to be prefabricated, falsified, or cleansed if they don’t appear with their times, their rhythmic memories, in their ontologico-cultural anchorages and foundations [...], acknowledging the meanings of silences, the placement and duration of the latter between sounds. Their placement and duration in times, rhythms, and implications that do not correspond with the linear and objective times of rationality, of modern music and temporality, as they are connected to the intersubjectivity afforded by the understandings and experiences one shares with their families and communities. [...] The oral channels and foundations implied in the processes of extended listening, of rhythmic memory and silences have proven to be efficient or valid for the continuation of our knowledges, bodies and musics 52 See Martijn van Beenen and Ernestina van de Noort, El cante bueno duele, NTR/Flamenco Biënnale Nederland, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1CON72lac. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 20 [...] to avoid the erasure, forgetting and the “abyssal silence” regarding our ontologies-cultures, knowledges, learnings, and ways of life, among others, through the daily presence of our cosmosonorities [of Gitano-song, IPB]. 53 With this reflection we are about to say goodbye, waiting to hear other possible answers and co-translations, re-cognitions and ex-changes. This conversation is an aesthesic exercise that accompanies the audiobook. Although the latter (or both of them together), due to its senses, meanings and emergences, could perhaps be renamed as “audio-cosmosonority” or audio-memories brought to the present by Gitano-song and Romani voices. One more observation, as a means of support: the audiobook is not colonial/colonising (or decolonising) on its own, by its own will, but rather its position, presentation and intentions are related to the questions and possible answers that we brought up for the work of “co-translation and directed translation”; those that we have been naming throughout the text, in the audio and the bibliography. Two thoughts come up regarding what we have just written: the audiobook, the qualities of the “cosmosonorous epistemologies of feeling,” of Gitano-song and its ontologico-cultural foundations and anchorages, are not amenable to be reproduced, felt-lived in their totality in any available register. However, according to our experience in this case, we are not concerned to admit that the audiobook that you will be able to listen to corresponds with or localises narratives of recovery, reparation, and cognitive justice. In a format or register like the audiobook, or (almost) any other, when its voices manifest themselves together with their vernacular loci of enunciation, the latter can actually express or express themselves, represent or represent themselves, exist or co-exist, localise or localise themselves, translate or translate themselves, acknowledge or acknowledge themselves, be heard in the fullness of this (their) being. Although it is difficult to express with words, we feel that these processes are a part of the intentions and emergences of the “cosmosonorous-audio.” These collaborated presences and actions allow to expand or detach ourselves from the lineal register; they hint at the possibility of taking distance from perceptive, emotional, and cognitive normalisations; they work towards the presence and availability of knowledges and experiences that, otherwise, would hardly be able to coparticipate in academic and scientific-academic settings. Yes, by proposing these intricate structures, and they are not the only ones nor do we pretend 53 Periáñez-Bolaño, Cosmosonoridades, 151-3. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 21 that they are, we re-cognise our ancestors; our genealogies and families; the usual treatment of our elders and children, or of those struggling with their health; the positioning of bodies among themselves as they acknowledge each other in a shared sense of belonging; the emission of vernacular codes of communication and expression; our memories and sonorities, our names and histories, our ailments and (some) strategies and untranslatabilities to negotiate them, among other explicit and implicit selections and emergences that appear in the twenty minutes that were selected for the “cosmosonorous audio recording.” Like we said at the beginning, we believe that this is an innovative creation. In it, we a not spoken for without our presence, as tends to be the case in colonial and hegemonic settings for the production of knowledge, art, and flamenco. This is not an audiobook in the strict sense of the term, since we have resignified and transformed it. It cannot be seen, it cannot be read, it is not uni-vocal. It is spoken, heard, discussed, cotranslated. It is not unidirectional, but rather it is traversed by multiple temporalities, memories, rationalities, voices and multilocalised sonorities. It smells, it has flavour. It is not the outcome of one single encounter, but rather contains the joint presences of multiple spaces, times and relationalities, agreements and selections. It is not an artefact, it is not an audiobook, and allow me to ask whether it may be called a work of art. In any case, it does not contain a closed or finished process, it is open to transformations after this first experience. For us, now that we are leaving the “door ajar” and our memories well protected from La Zúa, that dangerous swamp from Antonio Ortega’s eponymous memoire, 54 the walls-borders that enclose Las Tres Mil Viviendas are (symbolically) crumbling; as are the walls-borders that are watching over Factoría Cultural and the Office of the Commission for Polígono Sur, and this is an important moment. 55 The collaborators of this proposal in the shape of an cosmosonorous-audio have Names. They are, 54 Antonio Ortega Rubio, La Zúa, (Ediciones en Huida/Altramuz Editorial, 2022). 55 The expression “door ajar” has been highlighted since it appears in the lyrics of a soleá. It is also the title of a poetry volume by the journalist and writer Joaquín López Bustamante (Libros de la Herida, 2021). For its part, the Office of the Commission for Polígono Sur is a unique institution in its motivation and composition. Located in the neighbourhood of Polígono Sur (also known as Las Tres Mil Viviendas) in Seville, where the population mainly consists of Gitano families and other groups localised in the Global South, the Office is the outcome of the agreement, management and control of four administrative entities at a local, autonomic, state and European level. In this context, it is not surprising that the resources that went into the construction of Factoría Cultural are mostly European funds. The Office’s website can be consulted here: http://www.poligonosursevilla.es/joomla/index.php/quienes-somos/comisionado. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 22 they feel, know, belong, speak, listen, respond, translate. They are Memories in the present. They are localised. They are carriers of knowledges, inter-genealogies and connections. They have agreed their coparticipation knowing the intentions, motivations and restrictions of the format, of academic timeframes, of unforeseen events in everyday life. We believe it is appropriate to end here with the acknowledgement of their presences; this would not have been possible without them. Moreover, after the bibliography, we have left a list of audio-visual and audio recordings that may help the listeners and readers delve more deeply into some of the issues that have been discussed here. Let’s start. We would like to thank those responsible for the journal Liminalities for the opportunity to be heard and to not be (mis)translated. Similarly, to Carlos and Pedro (co-ordinators of this special issue) for their interest in my book Cosmosonoridades, for their re-cognitions, understandings and exchanges, for promoting creativity and co-laboration. Our thanks to the members of the Office of Countercultural Commissioning CO2, Kike Res, Cristina del Águila, Ana Pérez and Elena Lara, for their good work, their care, patience, for accompanying and understanding us during the whole creation and production process. A special mention needs to be given to the following key collaborators, my primos Antonio Ortega, Miguel Ángel Vargas and Amador Gabarri. On a personal level, and for the creative process as a whole, their presences have been very important. They unhinge the space of power represented by Factoría Cultural, they manage to unsettle the linearity of the register or the standardisation of perceptions and cognitions, of sentiments and emotions. Their voices, music, and knowledges reorient the relevance of the what towards the how, in a setting that struggles to sustain the echoes and energies of rhythmic memories in the present continuous. They are present together with their loci of enunciation. Their presences situate and transmit localised knowledges. Waiting for your listenings, we will now really say goodbye where we started: ¡Nais tumengue, tías y tíos, primas y primos. A nuestras ancestras y ancestros! which is where and how Gitano-song originates. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 23 Bibliography Blacking, John. How Musical is Man? Alianza Editorial, 2010. Buhigas Jiménez, Rafael. “Una (re)lectura gitana de Peaky Blinders. Nociones generales desde la crítica construida en los estudios gitanos.” Cuadernos Gitanos 9, no. 1 (2018): 31-44. https://institutoculturagitana.es/wpcontent/uploads/2018/12/CG-09-Una-relectura-gitana-de-PeakyBlinders.pdf. Carmona, Sarah. “Identité versus épistémologie romani. Entre essentialisme et universalisme.” Parti des Indigènes de la République, 14 March, 2014. https://indigenes-republique.fr/identite-versus-epistemologie-romanientre-essentialisme-et-universalisme/. Carmona Durán, Sandra. “La visibilidad lésbica en el pueblo gitano.” Gitanos, Radio Nacional de España 5, 25 November, 2023. Audio, 56:19. https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/gitanos/visibilidad-lesbica-pueblogitano/7018809/. Castaño Madroñal, Ángeles. “Colonialidad interna y europeidad en la política para la inmigración en Andalucía.” Revista Andaluza de Antropología 10 (2016): 192-222. Dwyer, Owen J. y John Paul Jones III. “White socio-spatial epistemology.” Social and Cultural Geography 2, no. 1 (2000): 255-71. Fejzula, Sebijan. “The Anti-Roma Europe: Modern ways of disciplining the Roma body in urban spaces.” Revista Direito e Práxis 10, no. 3 (2019): 2097-116. González Casanova, Pablo. “Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo.” América Latina 6, no. 3 (1963): 15-32. López Bustamante, Joaquín. La puerta entorná. Libros de la Herida, 2021. Mignolo, Walter y Rolando Vázquez. “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings.” Social Text: Periscope (2013). https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesiscolonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/. Motos, Isaac. “Lo que no se olvida: 1499-1978.” Anales de Historia Contemporánea 25, no. 1 (2009): 57-74. Ortega Rubio, Antonio. La Zúa. Ediciones en Huida/Altramuz Editorial, 2022. Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. “Comunicando márgenes a través de la música en el Mediterráneo: Flamenco y Ghiwane, encuentros y emergencias.” PhD thesis, Universidad de Sevilla, 2019a. Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. Cosmosonoridades: cante-gitano y canción gyu. Epistemologías del sentir. Akal, 2023. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 24 Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. “Discursos y representaciones locales sobre la patrimonialización del flamenco en Andalucía, un proceso multinivel.” Revista de Antropología Social 28, no. 1 (2019b): 71-93. Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. “Flamenco, ‘zona de contacto’ colonial.” In Desarmar las opresiones del capitalismo desde las Epistemologías del Sur, edited by María Paula Meneses, Karina Bidaseca and Ángeles Castaño. McGraw-Hill Interamericana de España, in press. Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. “Músicas del Sur global, saberes y prácticas del sentir. ¿Un lugar común para la resistencia y la re-existencia?” In Estéticas descoloniales desde el Sur. Arte, memorias y cuerpos, edited by Karina Andrea Bidaseca and Maria Paula Guttierrez Meneses. CLACSO, 2021. https://www.clacso.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/V2_Poeticaerotica_N2.pdf Periáñez-Bolaño, Iván. “Traduciendo a Atfal/Bnat El Ghiwane como conocimiento situado desde la ecología de los saberes en Marruecos.” Revista OPSIS 16, no. 1 (2016): 68-87. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen. Miradas ch´ixi desde la historia andina. Tinta Limón, 2015. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Un mundo ch´ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Tinta Limón, 2018. Rodríguez, Vicente. “Somos RomaPop. La cultura pop globalizada y la lucha de los derechos romaníes por la autodefinición en la era de los superhéroes.” In Antigitanismo. Trece miradas, edited by Ismael Cortés, Patricia Caro and Markus End. Traficantes de Sueños, 2021. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press, 2018. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. El milenio huérfano. Ensayos para una nueva cultura política. 2a edición. Editorial Trotta, 2011. Simour, Lhoussain. Larbi Batma, Nass el-Ghiwane and Postcolonial Music in Morocco. McFarland & Company, 2016. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Macmillan, 1988. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2012. Vázquez, Rolando and Miriam Barrera. “Aesthesis decolonial y tiempos relacionales. Una entrevista a Rolando Vázquez.” Calle 14: Revista de investigación en el campo del arte 11, no. 18 (2016). https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.c14.2016.1.a06. Iván Periáñez Bolaño Home-Place-World 25 Further recommended resources to complement audiobook and text Alcobendas, Miguel. Camelamos Naquerar. Film, 1976. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOzi04RhC9k. Carmona Durán, Sandra and Tamara Gámez. Altramuz Editorial-La editorial que cuenta con la diversidad. https://altramuzeditorial.com. Heredia Maya, José. “Camelamos Naquerar.” In Obra poética completa (Poesía y Teatro). Universidad de Granada, 2013 [1976]. López Bustamante, Joaquín. “Gitanos.” Programme on Radio Nacional de España 5. https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/gitanos/. Peña Fernández, Pedro. Los gitanos flamencos. Almuzara, 2013. Ortega Rubio, Antonio. Flamencos & Cronopios. Programme on 8tv Andalucía, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/@OJEANDOTE/videos. Ortega Rubio Antonio (lyrics), Alicia Gil (vocals) and Lito Espinosa (guitar). “Huele a mi Agüela”. Song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4LRgGp7xNY. Peña Fernández, Juan, Pedro Peña Fernández, Enrique de Melchor and Félix Grande. Persecución. CD, 1976. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3F0xGNEuSU&list=PLz9DI9M7 ARX6LKq3Y-GdPNfj18PF_K-I9. Vargas, Miguel Ángel and Belén Maya. Persecución. Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNZ33Bxn0Y. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncsa/4.0/; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2nd Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA