The thread running through these classes moves from colonial history step by step to today’s creative practice. I think the teacher was talking about the past and the present, and the river is a living artefact — it flows endlessly, running through different periods, a bridge carrying different eras, and what it flows toward is the future, that is, how we speak out for it and how we change the future. Water here is not just a metaphor: hydrofeminism holds that the human body is mostly made of water, and that the body, water and nature are inherently inseparable; when water is polluted, the connection between humans and nature is broken too. So the river is both a carrier of memory and a connecting point between body and environment, which is what made me understand why “speaking out” must start from the body and the senses, not from slogans.
Beyond that, from history to cultural performance as resistance — the origins of Notting Hill Carnival, Claudia Jones’s line “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom,” and carnival as a public event that transforms violent trauma into beauty, love and free bodily expression. This knowledge made me reflect on my creative approach. In the past, I thought art succeeded if it made the audience feel the same force and emotion, so in week two my sound design leaned Hollywood-style — using intense sound effects and emotion to “manufacture” impact, pressing the audience down with sound. After reflecting, the carnival the teacher talked about had a big influence on me. I realised that for people who have lived through trauma, art should not be another round of shock and consumption, but something beautiful, dignified, participatory and healing. So my sound design shifted from “shocking the audience with sound” to “letting the audience stir up sound themselves” — the immersive part gently receives the audience, and the interactive part makes everyone part of the river, replacing preaching and oppression with beauty and participation.
Our group’s sound narrative depicts how people endured suffering day after day in the ship’s hold. We used the body itself as an instrument — breath, waves, footsteps, the friction between the body and its restraints — to let the audience feel the weight of that era through sound rather than through graphic description, so that the body becomes a carrier of memory. But I now think this creative approach is problematic.
We need to reflect: content creation should not pursue a “performative shock” that deliberately heightens impact, but should place consideration for the audience in an important position. Especially when a work involves real historical trauma, sound is not just a tool for building atmosphere — it may also trigger the audience’s own unprocessed traumatic experiences. Therefore, rather than using the body to reproduce pain and subject the audience to an oppressive auditory shock, it is better to treat the body as an entry point for connection and healing — letting breath, heartbeat and other most basic rhythms of life become sounds the audience can enter and empathise with, rather than a heaviness imposed on them. This also made me reconsider the ethics of sound design: success is not about making the audience “feel the same pain,” but about letting the audience, on the premise of being informed and respected, choose for themselves how to approach this history.