Voces subsistenciales

During one of the seminars of the Programa de Estudios Radicales (PER) organized by Suburbia, dedicated to Gerald Raunig’s book Dissemblage and its translation into Spanish, a group of activist researchers drifted through the Lagunillas neighbourhood —the territory discussed in the song—asking neighbours what a “subsistential territory” meant to them. Rather than attempting to represent their answers musically, the residents’ minor voices are assembled in a fragmentary manner, alluding to the multiplicities, the stammerings and the wisdom already present there—which cannot be the object of representation, nor captured, but which resists and persists, generating echoes of a murmuring fabric.

The accompanying rhythm, with its displaced beats, ghost notes, syncopations and broken beats, reflects the incompleteness of the rhythms of a neighbourhood that nevertheless insists and subsists in the present. Broken beats are a fundamental part of Andalusian culture (crystallised as breakbeat), and of Málaga in particular, ranging from flamenco to verdiales, via rave culture, which was particularly significant as a form of cultural, bodily, affective and popular resistance during the 1990s, influenced by the rise of British rave culture and jungle music, and which shattered all the cultural identity frameworks of the region’s folklore.