Contact Zones: Wake for Water, Earth, Metal

The Damen Silos, former grain silos abandoned since the 1970s, are now being destroyed. In 2022, the state sold the site to MAT Ltd. Partnership, a lethal polluter in the area, who began demolition in 2025. Deeply concerned about compounding health risks, ecological destruction, increased policing and gentrification, residents petitioned to turn the site into a public park, but to no avail.  Instead of addressing ongoing legacies of environmental racism, the demolition is dramatically increasing the toxic burden for nearby residents and for the waterways, animals, and plant communities that have reclaimed the site. More demolitions are scheduled, including the upcoming partial demolitions of the Fisk coal plant, which is sure to be more lethal. Local communities organize to sound the alarm: while remaking this stretch of canal will benefit particular business interests and future wealthier residents, the cost for this remaking is being paid by the same bodies and communities it is intended to displace.    

For over 50 years, the Damen silos and surrounding 23 acres have become a beloved place. Sumac, boneset, aster, swamp sages and goldenrod flourish in the ruins. The engineers and gardeners have been beavers and birds. Neighborhood youth have been gathering, creating and dreaming here for generations. For many of us, the destruction of the silos is a process of erasing histories of communal care, creativity, and experimentation in the wake of industrial abandonment. Community struggles have been defeated, and the main buildings have been demolished. But the destruction of the site continues, as do the struggles over its meanings. We continue to bear witness to how the ground of the site is being remade, and to the costs of this remaking on particular bodies, beings and communities.  

Contact Zones is a collective project that focuses on the Damen Silos, the Sims facility, where metal from the demolition was taken for shredding, and the canal linking the two. This project builds on many years of artistic engagement with this area, as well as sustained involvement in the community campaign around this and subsequent demolition permits. Over the course of 2025, one member of our collective organized a series of eight gatherings: a solstice event, a series of community story-sharings, a participatory water play, and two flotillas. During the active demolition of the main structure, we began using contact microphones, which sense vibrations as they pass through solid objects instead of through air. We were surprised at the hidden sonic language that speaks through metal, water, and earth. Deep, almost infrasonic vibrations, sustained drones, and high-pitched shrieks create a dense sonic experience at the boundary between sound and music. We also began exploring how this mode of listening can reflect both on deep ecological wounds and persistent capacities for renewal and repair. For example, placing a contact microphone on the outside of the metal seawall that lines the canal senses vibrations as they pass through the metal. The seawall, which operates to violently separate land from water, paradoxically becomes a resonant medium: transmitting the vibrational presence of moving water to the roots of plant communities that thrive here, amidst ruins and redevelopment.   

We will continue recording throughout spring-summer 2026, as site demolition continues at the level of the ground. Our project will develop a sound archive that we will share as a website, accompanied by an artist booklet reflecting onlocal histories of socio-ecological violence, repair and resistance. We will use these found sounds to create an album of new music, to be released in Spring 2027. Throughout this time, we will also develop a series of community events combining music, listening/sounding workshops, and storytelling. Our hope is that art, alongside community struggle, can help confront ongoing histories of social and ecological destruction, create space for collective grieving, and celebrate modes of relation that refuse the violent logic of extraction and development. 
 
To lament is “to grieve audibly.” For us, lament is moving from powerlessness to power, from grieving in silence to collective grieving out loud. We draw inspiration from keening (a near-lost form of Irish mourning), Proyecto Tribugá (a song collection for the doomed whale nursery in the industrializing Colombian port of Tribugá), and J Dilla’s Donuts (a deathbed album and coded sound collage of grief and legacy). We draw from the rage and tenderness of care in the ruins of empire; the persistent soundings of place that are both call and echo.  
 
As demolitions and redevelopment intensify, we seek a practice that can refuse silence and erasure through archiving, memory-making, grieving and celebration.