ONDA Aki

恩田晃

Biography

In this project, Aki Onda looks to trace the memories of community gardening on the East Village by composing and compiling field recordings, photographs, and texts. Many of these gardens came to life against the backdrop of an economically distressed and fractured New York City in the 1970s. Often seeded by local residents and community activists, these makeshift green spaces were designated for gardening, art-making, and community gatherings. Onda looks to visit a wide array of these green spaces during the COVID 19 pandemic from April - August 2020, attending to their distinct rhythms and capturing their lived history. To frame these recordings, Onda looks to borrow from and pay homage to avant-garde filmmaker Harry Smith’s East Village recordings, aural ethnographies of the neighborhood’s soundscapes. Like Smith, Onda looks for the material and spiritual resonances nurtured in these communities and gardens that still emanate today.

Field recordings were made at the 9th Street Community Garden Park and La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez Community Garden.

Thanks to:
Yuji Agematsu, Christopher Batenhorst, Loyan Beausoleil, AnnelCabrera-Marus, Margarita Calderon, Sophie Cavoulacos, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Anne P. Dardis, Bill DiPaolo, Joanee Freedom, Jeanne Liotta, Lenny Librizzi, Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens (LUNGS), Donald Loggins, George Hirose, Max Katz, Janene Knox, Cathy Kord, Charles Krezell, Kathy Creutzburg, Laurie Olinder, Christine Datz-Romero, Magali Regis, Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado, Edwin Albert Santana, Kyleen Sanchez, Javid Syed, David George Schultz, Yuri Simojo, EJay Sims, John Shuttleworth, Ryan Mendenhall, Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS), Grace Tankersley, Kate Temple-West, Alexia Weidler, Bill Weinberg, Lauren Wilson, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

From Aki Onda, "Bon Voyage", Cassette Memories Vol.2, released from Improvised Music from Japan in 2003, reissued from Room 40 in 2020.

Biography

Born 1967 in Nara Prefecture, Onda currently resides in Ibaraki Prefecture.

His musical and visual works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of field recordings (or, as Onda refers to them, ‘sound diaries’). Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in the fields of art, film, music, and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Loren Connors, David Toop, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his works at documenta 14, the Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, The Kitchen, and Walker Art Center, among other institutions. After residing in New York for many years, he now again lives and works in Japan.

Footnote

Birdsongs and bells ringing in the wind; human voices speaking in a language other than English: these sounds were recorded in Manhattan, New York, during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing city-wide lockdown. Despite the tranquility of these soundscapes, they are haunted by absences. Though the public gardens in which Onda recorded still serve as communal gathering spots and offer respite from the city’s frantic pace, their status is politically and economically precarious, a precarity felt in the delicate nature of Onda’s recordings.

Onda has employed these ethnographic practices through various means throughout his career, creating sonic archives which often point to what they cannot preserve. His work is an attempt to rekindle and re-hear our own past, to hold ourselves against the erosion of time and to tend to incidents overlooked and forgotten.

Installation View

ONDA Aki, Silence Prevails: East Village Community Gardens During the Pandemic, 2020
field recordings, videos, archival pigment prints, dye-sublimation print, texts, map

ONDA Aki, Collage on Cassettes, 2020
Stickers, poster, text, broken portable cassette recorders