Sound(e)scaping Modernity in Lilian Garcia-Roig’s Hyperbolic Nature: La Florida

by Bryce Noe

Lilian Garcia-Roig’s landscape paintings overwhelm viewers’ senses with their depictions of forests across the Americas. While these natural spaces reflect the artist’s personal aim to resolve the lacuna between her Cuban and American identities, her ultimate mission is to offer viewers a sense of belonging—which she deems crucial in constructing personal identity.¹ Yet, as we shall see, achieving a sense of belonging within these natural spaces challenges discourses of capitalist modernity that suggest, to use critic Jafari S. Allen’s words, “The Americas, constituted as a place of ‘new world’ discovery and conquest, is always already modern. Modernity begins with the invasion and conquest of indigenous Americans and the invasion and forced immigration of Africans.”² This displacement of ethnic groups, territories, and the resultant erasure of natural landscapes and peoples’ embodied knowledge of those spaces are corollaries of European tendencies to control natural resources and develop urban centers—economic and political urges indicative of capitalist modernity.³ Garcia-Roig’s forest depictions from across the Americas immerse viewers in spaces that are absent of images reflecting European invasion, conquest, displacement, and capitalist motives—factories, urban centers, and shipping ports, among other visual signifiers. These purely natural spaces seem to offer viewers escape routes from the oppressive forces of modernity that displace peoples and their immediate environments. Through portraying these forest landscapes, Garcia-Roig aims to understand how nature can serve as a place of refuge, healing, and belonging.⁴

In this essay, I use Garcia-Roig’s Hyperbolic Nature: La Florida (2012–13) as a case study to explore how nature imagery evokes such an imagined space for refuge, healing, and belonging beyond capitalist modernity.⁵ The large-scale painting is an assemblage of five panels, each depicting separate locations in Florida’s subtropical environment. Grouped together in a single composition, these disparate images read as one entanglement of underbrush, marsh, tree branches, and palm trees—an effect intended to immerse the viewer in the natural landscape and, subsequently, to invite them to determine how best to make their way through it. The human subject must navigate not only a visual landscape, but also an imagined “soundworld.” Indeed, Garcia-Roig’s piece evokes a soundscape that facilitates a sense of belonging in the natural world wherein one can sound(e)scape—or construct an imagined or physical soundscape to escape one’s immediate soundworld—the policed sonic airspace tied to modernity. 

Navigating an Antimodern Entanglement of Sound 

Hyperbolic Nature: La Florida invites the hearing subject to construct and then navigate their natural soundscape, to experience leaves bristling in the wind, the burbling of a creek, or the thud of a branch falling into the underbrush. The perceiver, moreover, may impose acousmatic sounds—auditory stimuli that are heard, but not seen—onto the forest: Footsteps, the swish of underbrush scratching one’s skin, and the guttural expressions of exertion. As we shall see, belonging within this visual and sonic entanglement of natural imagery defies those contemporary notions of belonging in the physical world that are tied to capitalist modernity. To analyze perceivers’ aural experiences and sense of belonging against those linked to capitalist modernity, a brief discussion of modernity and its soundworld is efficacious. 

Although the definition of “modernity” is highly contested in various academic schools of thought, the term broadly refers to a future-oriented worldview in which social progress, technological development, and the domination of nature are central aims.⁶ In the nineteenth century, the sounds of urban expansion and industrialism, to which this worldview contributed, replaced nature sounds as the loudest sonic phenomena people experienced—thunder was, after all, the loudest sound heard in cities before industrialism and the noise associated with motorized modes of transportation and the incessant din of factory and construction machinery.⁷ As cities became louder in the twentieth century, noise became a major health concern among city dwellers and workers.⁸ For instance, the deafening industrial clamor that permeated urban dwelling and workspaces resulted in severe stress and loss of sleep, and thus contributed to poor productivity and hearing issues among factory workers.⁹ Nevertheless, while modernity’s soundworld contains a cacophony of detrimental noise, its sonic airspace is attenuated by noise-abatement strategies—a development that reflects Americans’ and Europeans’ culturally informed sense of entitlement with regard to personal space and their reading of silence as civil.¹⁰ To ameliorate urban noise in cities, early twentieth-century acousticians and architects outfitted building interiors with sound-absorptive materials, in effect crafting, as Emily Thompson describes, “an echoless environment.”¹¹ That said, I refer to this sonic policing of space as—to borrow Thompson’s book title on the subject—the “soundscape of modernity.” Museums, to be sure, often constitute spaces permeated by urban sounds ultimately silenced by the auditory imaginings of museumgoers. 

Museumgoers’ Autonomy in De-Modernizing PAMM’s Soundscape 

As evident in several urban museums, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) contains a cacophonous soundscape of noises—including visitors dialoguing, children yelling, footsteps, and security guards transmitting messages via walkie-talkies, among other sounds—that permeate its exhibition spaces. Additionally, street noises like sirens, cruise ship horns (from the nearby Port of Miami), and traffic sounds bleed into the museum, ricocheting off the walls. Unlike workspaces and concert halls, museums are often not outfitted with sound-absorptive materials; after all, exhibition curators focus on offering subjects an enrapturing visual experience and give minimal attention to acoustic design and human audition.¹² As a result, to imagine Garcia-Roig’s natural soundscape, hearing subjects must tune out their immediate industrialized soundscape; in other words, museumgoers must de-urbanize (or de-modernize) their aural experience. 

Yet the perceiver’s autonomous role in silencing the museum’s soundworld raises an acousmatic question: Where are these natural sounds coming from? Clearly, whether viewing art, watching a silent film, or reading a book, one often develops sonic interpretations based on visual content—a process known as correspondence. As musicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel states: “What is essential in the sensuous-perceptible is not that which separates the senses from one another, but that which unites them; unites them among themselves; unites them with the entire (even with the non-sensuous) experience in ourselves; and with all the external world that there is to be experienced.”¹³ Our perceptions, in other words, are shaped by the very entanglement of our senses with external stimuli. For all intents and purposes, one sees Garcia-Roig’s depiction, and only then is able to hear its natural landscape. Physical soundwaves, therefore, are not the source of the sounds one projects onto her piece, but rather the piece’s visual properties—thus eliciting in museumgoers an aural experience that is not acousmatic. 

Nevertheless, if the museumgoer’s phenomenology of the piece’s soundworld lacks physical soundwaves, an ontological concern arises: Are these real sounds, or—put another way—do hearing subjects’ aural experiences even constitute a soundworld? Unlike sounds effected by physical vibrations that index a source or cause, “Imaginary sounds,” as music theorist Brian Kane asserts, “dissolve the unity of sonic source, cause, and effect as parts of a single physical event or process, and draw an ontological line between the effect and its source or cause.”¹⁴ According to Kane, these imaginary sounds constitute the phenomenological world of sound, where the severance of sound from any source or cause grants one’s perception autonomy beyond the physical world.¹⁵ While I agree that imagined aural perceptions are legitimate soundworlds despite lacking physical vibrations, I disagree that imagined soundworlds have autonomy beyond the materialistic world; rather, as stated above, museumgoers construct imagined soundworlds based on seeing the physical world. 

That said, although one’s aural perception of Garcia-Roig’s piece is phenomenological in that it lacks any causal relationship to the physical world, the perceiver’s perception is physical because it is heavily informed by the work’s visual properties. Indeed, to “hear” the piece’s natural sounds, the perceiver must construct a soundscape that both defies the museum’s soundscape and visually complements what they are seeing. The colors and shading, and the gaps between the colors, all endow the perceiver with information regarding the work’s materiality and, therefore, how the subtropical matter should respond sonically as one passes through it. Additionally, the paintings’ position on the wall corresponds to perceivers’ visual orientation—down at the ground, straight ahead, and straight up—which enables them to ascertain the body part (feet, legs, torso, head) that will interact with the natural matterand, in turn, how the environment will respond sonically. When I view the bottom painting, for instance, the light blue on the left, the brown in the center, and the ascending green strips not only appear to represent water, the tree trunk, and grass, respectively, but also matter that sonically responds to footsteps and lower body movements. In this painting, I imagine the crackling of leaves as they are stepped on, the splash of creek water as one traverses it, and the snap of tree branches scraping one’s leg. The colors and spatial position of matter depicted in the piece and the positions of the paintings on the wall are clearly physical ocular properties that affect my aural experience. 

Nevertheless, though the visual properties of the piece evoke certain sounds, the museumgoer’s sonic experiences remain largely covert; to be sure, my particular interpretation of the work’s colors and materiality may not be shared among all subjects. In their brief essay “In Museums, There is No Hearing Subject,” media scholars Jonathan Sterne and Zoë De Luca assert that museums are spaces that generate multiple listening perspectives. They write: “Perhaps there is a ‘sonic we,’ but it is a collectivity forged in difference.”¹⁶ Indeed, while museumgoers physically navigate the same sonic airspace, their experiential soundworlds differ based on their individual interpretations of the piece’s visual attributes. 

Taken together, perceivers’ aural experience of the forest scene and their immediate urban soundscape constitute two ontologically different soundworlds—one phenomenological and the other physical—and, hence, some museumgoers can autonomously craft an antimodern soundworld by perceiving the two simultaneously; that is, rather than completely sound(e)scaping PAMM’s reverberant, chaotic sonic environment, hearing subjects can transform it by assimilating sounds from one soundworld to the other. Since the soundscape of modernity is intertwined with the urban desire to silence sounds deemed untamed or not signifying human progress and productivity, superimposing nature sounds onto the urban subverts the sonic hierarchy between nature and urban. In other words, when museumgoers concurrently construct an imagined natural soundworld while hearing the urban sounds surrounding them, they situate nature sounds against the soundscape of modernity in a way that denies the former’s erasure by the latter. After all, acousticians and architects cannot control sounds that lack a sound source. From a museological standpoint, museumgoers’ role in producing nature sounds’ hegemonic status aligns with themes of colonialism, declarations of authority, and the blurring of national borders shared among the works displayed in PAMM’s exhibition Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.¹⁷ Indeed, the exhibition provides a space where artists of color from Africa, Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean ally with power and visibility, crafting an artistic response to slavery and the displacement of people of color.¹⁸ Similar to museumgoers’ ability to sonify nature in spaces where it is dominated, museumgoers sonify artworks, thereby rendering the exhibition a site in which historically silenced peoples and spaces are not only seen, but also heard. 

Museumgoers, for instance, can construct a subtropical soundworld based on Garcia-Roig’s piece to sonify the sense of place and belonging to space the artist experienced when crafting the piece—a belonging she finds difficult to achieve in the United States, where her Cuban and American cultural identities are understood as opposing—and not meant to coexist in the same space. As she notes, her predilection for unclaimed, dense natural landscapes indexes her desire to reconcile her cultural identities and, as a result, to connect to spaces.¹⁹ Yet museumgoers perceive her connection to nature not only spatially but also temporally. Indeed, Garcia-Roig sought to portray how the foliage shifts throughout the day, thereby depicting the temporality of a certain space and, in turn, representing her experience within that space over time.²⁰ Moreover, depicting how the space changes over time facilitates museumgoers’ auditory experience of such change. For example, in the case of the bottom painting, I find myself translating the ripples in the creek into sounds indexing water flowing downstream over time. Perceivers can construct a phenomenological connection to the subtropical landscape based on the artist’s experience of that piece, and—in so doing—transform Allied with Power into a space wherein museumgoers are led to sonify artists’ and depicted people’s experiences.²¹ 

Additionally, although the five canvases in Garcia-Roig’s piece were crafted on separate days and locations—and, therefore, informed by the artist’s particular experiences in space and time—I perceive the paintings together as one spatiotemporal experience. By merging pictorial representations of different natural spaces, the artist seemingly draws attention away from her own experience at specific natural sites and times, and yet she foregrounds her general experience of (and entanglement in) the subtropical world within a day. Nevertheless, being in Miami, I often perceive the piece as representing one’s general experience and entanglement in Miami’s premodern soundworld. In other words, hearing the piece enables one not only to experience nature where it is dominated and erased—namely, in the urban setting—without traveling to it, but also to impose a natural soundscape that likely once permeated the land PAMM now occupies. After all, until the early twentieth century, Miami was merely a subtropical swampland, which made it rather inaccessible from other parts of the nation and, therefore, not conducive to urban expansion and industrialism.²² Hence, while Garcia-Roig’s piece offers museumgoers an aural sense of her brief experience in the subtropical environment, it also invites an aural reading of soundscapes erased by urban development. 

While this essay is focused on Hyperbolic Nature: La Florida, PAMM’s Allied with Power draws attention to colonial invasion, slavery, cultural displacement, and the silencing of peoples and spaces motivated by capitalist modernity. As museumgoers approach and contemplate each work, they temporarily construct and situate themselves in soundscapes evoking different spaces, times, and events. Hence, although Garcia-Roig uses nature imagery to cultivate a sense of place and belonging to space, some works immerse hearing subjects within soundworlds tied to capitalist modernity. For instance, when museumgoers enter the exhibition, they are immediately confronted with Kara Walker’s Securing a Motherland Should Have Been Sufficient (2016), a large three-part drawing depicting enslaved Africans constructing an ark on top of other enslaved peoples. From an aural standpoint, the sounds of hammering nails into the planks covering other Africans can signify capitalism’s dominance and control over them; in other words, enslaved peoples themselves are not only restrained underneath the ark, but their voices are also caught beneath the structure—and thus silenced by the sound of labor above. Indeed, as museumgoers confront and contemplate the artworks exhibited in Allied with Power, they phenomenologically sonify silenced people’s experiences and navigate displaced soundscapes, thereby soundscaping PAMM like an orchestra that loudly dominates—rather than is dominated by—the soundscape of modernity. 

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1. Lilian Garcia-Roig, artist’s statement, Lilian Garcia-Roig.com, http://www.liliangarcia-roig.com/statement/.
2. Jafari S. Allen, “Discursive Sleight of Hand: Race, Sex, Gender,” in ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 47.
3. Arturo Escobar, “Displacement, Development, and Modernity in the Colombian Pacific,” International Social Science Journal 55, no. 175 (March 2003): pp. 157, 165.
4. Garcia-Roig, artist’s statement.
5.  Rather than suggesting that nature does evoke positive experiences like refuge, healing, and belonging—there are, after all, natural phenomena such as hurricanes and landslides and confrontations with nonhuman animals that lead to negative experiences—I suggest that nature can evoke a yearning for spaces unaffected by capitalist modernity where one may find comfort beyond modern and urban spaces, though this is not guaranteed.
6. Maria Kaika, “The Urbanization of Nature,” in City and Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 11–12.
7. Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., “Introduction: Into Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 8.
8. Noise is defined as uncivilized, meaningless, and undesirable sound that disturbs the social environment and people’s entitlement to private space. See David Novak, “Noise,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 125; and Bull and Back, “Introduction,” p. 9.
9. Edward F. Brown et al., eds., City Noise: The Report of the Commission Appointed by Dr. Shirley W. Wynne, Commissioner of Health, to Study Noise in New York City and to Develop Means of Abating It (New York: Noise Abatement Commission, Department of Health, 1930), p. 17; and Allard E. Dembe, Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Conception of Work-Related Disorders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 195, 209.
10. Bull and Back, “Introduction,” p. 9.
11. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 284.
12. Jonathan Sterne and Zoë De Luca, “In Museums, There is No Hearing Subject,” Curator: The Museum Journal 62, no. 3 (July 2019): p. 302.
13.  Erich M. von Hornbostel, “The Unity of the Senses,” in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Willis D. Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1938), p. 214.
14. Brian Kane, “Kafka and the Ontology of Acousmatic Sound,” in Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 134.
15. Kane, “Kafka and the Ontology of Acousmatic Sound,” p. 134. 
16. Sterne and De Luca, “In Museums, There is No Hearing Subject,” p. 305. Emphasis original.
17.  Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami, November 7, 2020–February 6, 2022, https://www.pamm.org/about/news/2020/allied-power-african-and-african-diaspora-art-jorge-m-p%C3%A9rez-collection.
18.  Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.
19. Garcia-Roig, artist’s statement. 
20.  Garcia-Roig, artist’s statement.
21. The paintings featured in the Allied with Power exhibition are not all depictions of artists’ experiences; some depict the experiences of those affected by colonialism, slavery, and displacement.
22. Jan Nijman, “Early Liaisons,” in Miami: Mistress of the Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 8, 18.