Raven Chacon’s Silent Choir unfolds not in a concert hall but in the open air, where bodies themselves become the score. First performed at the Oceti Sakowin camp, near Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota during the 2016–17 No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) resistance protests in Washington, D.C., the piece instructed its participants to stand together and remain silent. No instruments, no amplification — only the charged quiet of presence. Chacon transforms silence into insurgency. In his work, silence is not absence but occupation: a deliberate refusal to be drowned out by the machinery of state, obliteration, and capital.

This silence is architectural. It inhabits space without the pipelines that channel oil across continents or the barbed wire that enforces their passage. It is a way of participating, of making audible the low drone of helicopters circling protests, the tremor of petrochemical extraction, the vibrating contamination carried in water bodies. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui reminds us, Indigenous peoples live under what she calls internal colonialism: dispossession not at the edges but woven into the structures of modern nation-states. Silent Choir stages this condition by turning silence into counter-infrastructure. Where pipelines roar, the choir withholds sound from extraction’s ear. Their silence does not yield. It blocks, interrupts, destabilizes.

At Standing Rock and in Silent Choir, water protectors (mostly women) understood sound as more than communication. Drums, chants, and prayer carried across camps, forming what might be called an acoustic barricade. Chacon’s Silent Choir resonates with this practice. Silence here is not passive, not defeatist. It is, as Walter Mignolo might say, a decolonial option: a choice to delink from colonial logics by composing otherwise. To listen to Silent Choir is to feel how quietness can overwhelm the noise of helicopters and sirens, how stillness can outlast floodlights and checkpoints.

Silence is also memory. Each unspoken breath recalls the lands submerged by dams, the sacred sites blasted apart by dynamite, the languages silenced by residential schools, the violence against bodies (human and more than human). Silent Choir makes these erasures audible by refusing to fill the air with anything else. It insists that the gap itself—what is missing, what has been taken—demands recognition. Kristina Lyons writes of “emergent forms of death warning” in landscapes saturated with chemicals and militarization, where toxicity does not only signal catastrophe but also gives rise to forms of resistance. In her work with Colombian communities facing extractivist devastation, death warnings are not only diagnoses of ruin but gestures toward alternative ways of living, tending, and imagining futures otherwise. Chacon’s silence works in a similar register: not merely absence, but an alarm tuned to frequencies of ongoing violence, insisting on the audibility of what states and corporations attempt to render inaudible. It is a register of violence already underway, but also a warning that listening differently—to silence, to its reverberations—might still protect fragile futures and cultivate forms of collective survival.

What emerges is an Indigenous architecture of sound. Not walls or monuments, but the assembly of bodies in stillness, carving out a space where extractive infrastructures cannot fully intrude. In this refusal, silence does not merely oppose pipelines; it unsettles the very logics that make such infrastructures possible. Farah Alkhoury has shown how large-scale toxic warfare experiments inscribe violence into land, water, and air, turning entire ecologies into testing grounds. Against this militarized saturation, Silent Choir builds a resonant counter-edifice. Their silence becomes both archive and proposition: registering the evidence of chemical and extractive savagery, while sketching the outline of another world where listening itself is insurgent, where refusal echoes longer than the roar of machines.

Tracklist:

You can listen to the songs accompanying this column below and the rest of the Sonic Kinships soundtrack here.

Raven Chacon, Still Life No. 3

The Halluci Nation, Electric Pow Wow Drum

Os Mutantes, Panis et Circensis

Bio

Ivan L. Munuera is a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. He is an Assistant Professor at Bard College; his research has been generously sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In 2020, Munuera was awarded the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship at Princeton University. Munuera has presented his work at various conferences and academic forums, from the Society of Architectural Historians and the European Architectural History Network to Columbia GSAPP, Princeton University, Het Nieuwe Instituut, CIVA Brussels and ETSAM, among many others. He has also published widely, from the Journal for Architectural Education (JAE), The Architect’s Newspaper to Log and e-flux.