Yapci Ramos
Freedom, 2019

Freedom is a duo-channel sound installation consisting of volcanic stones. It is a collision between the recorded song of a real bird and the artist’s whistle, a complex sequence of bird-like-whistle-sounds.

Yet one of Freedom’s birds is “free” while the other is not.

Ramos recorded the authentic bird in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, out the window of a seventh-floor room in what she describes as a virtual fortress in the city center, in a neighborhood specifically blacklisted by the safety guidelines she was given. The bird was singing amid intermittent gunfire (which the audience of the work never hears). 

Birds themselves are archetypal symbols of freedom; their ability to fly where they chose suggests a lack of constraints on their liberty. Birds in cages have no freedom of movement but they enjoy some safety from the violence of the world outside. In Tegucigalpa, Ramos was just that – a “bird in a cage”, listening to another species sing of its freedom from beyond her cage. For her, freedom is both freedom of movement and also freedom of expression. Who knows what exactly the two birds in conversation mean, but they need to be free to whistle.

Ramos’ whistles allude to el Silbo Gomero (the Gomeran Whistle), a system or “register” of whistles correspon- ding to phonetic Spanish, which developed on the Canarian island of Gomera and allows communication up and down the rugged hills and across the deep valleys. The Silbo Gomero predates the Spanish colonization and goes back to the Guanche culture and its lost language, thought to be based on the Tamazight family of languages spoken by the Berbers of North Africa.

Unlike the Silbo Gomero, however, what I have termed Ramos-song does not refer back to Spanish or some other human language; it is instead a series of evocative sounds, meaningful as much as bird song is meaningful. Its individual sounds do not denote something external but function more like the notes of music than the components of speech or whistled language.

 Is Freedom a whistle for help? Not exactly. But it’s a playful, droll, semi-musical, and ironic call for the human liberty of safety and security. As Ramos imitates a bird, I cannot help but chuckle to myself, free that I am, aflight.

Excerpt from essay written by DILLON COHEN, artist, writer and impact investor.