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The polyphonic potential of mutual aid collectives

Sounding solidarity in experimental audio

Matilda Jones

Yellow-vested personnel are turfing out anyone who looks like they might be homeless, using drugs or generally ‘lowering the tone’ on the trains or platforms. I am sitting opposite someone sleeping in a U8 carriage. At U-Bahnhof Boddinstrasse, they are awoken by security and pulled off the train.

Zurück bleiben bitte.

I first encountered Soli Cooking upon moving to the Berlin district of Neukölln in the Spring of 2022. Short for solidarity, ‘Soli’ is a community-based mutual aid group that cooks and distributes hot meals once a week, free of charge, to anyone who wants or needs them at the local train and underground station, S+U-Bahnhof Hermanstrasse. Despite having lived in the city for several years, my arrival in this specific neighborhood was marked by a confrontation with homelessness, addiction, and drug use. This is the context in which Soli operates, although it must be said that many people who accept the food are not necessarily out of work, unhoused or dependent on illicit substances.¹ An amorphous mix of over one-hundred people – friends, neighbors, colleagues and comrades – the collective is sustained by the voluntary labor of the un-/underemployed: artists, freelancers, academics and laid-off tech-workers. In March 2024, a few of us got together to record an experimental interview/documentary about the project for my co-hosted show Trouble in Paradise on Cashmere Radio. A blend of different voices, local field recordings, and snippets of self-composed electronic music, this crafted soundwork comprises the intricate assemblages of a pre-record (via production techniques such as montage, stereo-panning, interspersal and overlay), as well as capturing a potent sense of liveness that arises from convivial congregation in urban space.

The necessity of Soli’s work is easily established by situating the mutual aid collective in the broader context of Neukölln. Stigmatized as a dangerous ‘ghetto’ containing ‘no-go areas’, this traditionally multicultural, low-income district is subject to much racist media commentary surrounding issues of drugs, criminality and so-called ‘failed integration’.² As well as being extremely diverse – up to 28% of inhabitants hold a foreign passport – the borough is one of the most densely populated areas in the whole of Germany.³ In addition to refugees from the Middle East and lately Ukraine, white Germans, Turkish-Germans and Turkish-Turks live alongside immigrants from Eastern Europe and various Western countries.⁴ I myself am from the UK. It is also worth mentioning that, in addition to a significant Romani community in the north of the borough,⁵ the area around Sonnenallee has the largest Palestinian population in Europe.⁶ Although Neukölln is home to a large working class population, over the past ten to fifteen years lower-income demographics have been increasingly priced-out of the more central and desirable Altbauviertel⁷ toward the southern edges.⁸ In line with the continuing onslaught of gentrification and rising rents, the district remains subject to both racist stereotyping and stringent policing.⁹

Beneath the streets chugs the U8 underground line. This southerly section of the line – spanning roughly from U-Bahnhof Moritzplatz (in Kreuzberg) to the terminus at Hermannstrasse – is notorious for its association with poverty, homelessness, and substance use.¹⁰ Due to the presence of hard drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, this stretch of the U8 has been subject to much political scrutiny, with the city’s transport authority Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) and Christian Democrat Mayor Kai Wegner announcing a drive to ensure ‘increased safety and cleanliness’ of the stations, with a miraculous 700,000 euros allocated to the project and a promise of support from the police.¹¹ Amidst this fraught social context, Soli Cooking (inherent to its name) enacts and embodies a project of care and solidarity in opposition to gentrification, inequality, social cleansing, and an increasingly hostile police presence. Formed in March 2020 by local chef Sarah Crane amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective has since distributed – if approximate spreadsheet figures are to be believed – over five-thousand meals. Since the project began, the need for these meals has only intensified, as living costs have soared and city budgets (including services combatting addiction and homelessness) have been slashed.¹²

In the soundwork about the project, the grim realities of this urban setting are rendered alongside a more hopeful everyday conviviality. The rumble of tube trains, the roaring traffic and the multilingual chatter are not merely an affected aural backdrop, but essential to capturing the actuality of the scene. As a polyvocal sound collage, foregrounding various peoples’ experiences of participating in the collective, the soundwork captures the process of collective organizing by encompassing a sense of The Intimate, The Virtual and The Public. First broadcast on Cashmere Radio in April 2024, a collectively run community radio station also sustained by the work of volunteers, the piece is indicative of an era bereft of social and cultural funding, yet also testament to the significance of collaborative and creative solidarity in opposition to the brutality of fiscal austerity.

The Intimate

[clatter of mic]
Finn: Um, it’s recording already and you can just see how it sounds with this new…
Sam: Yeah, it sounds good… There’s quite a lot of background…
Finn: Yeah…
Sam: I guess that’s inevitable.
[….]
Sam: Oh my god, you can hear my stomach
[…]
[a different setting is faded in: sounds of a kitchen – extractor fan, chopping food, running water etc]
Sarah: [Laughing]
Finn: Just checking if the levels are… correct
Sarah: Does it go? It works?
Finn: Yeah, it works¹³

As the soundwork begins, the setting up of the microphone across various locations conjures, both the polyphonic (characterized by multiple voices) and the polychronic (rendering the impression of multiple events occurring at the same time).¹⁴ This overlaying of parallel settings not only establishes the audio’s experimentalism (which, despite containing resonances of a traditional interview, presents a frenetic patchwork of noise and voices), but also sounds the social relations between members of the collective in a way that emphasizes physical presence. Conveying the rough-around-the-edges/DIY nature of community radio and grassroots organizing, the shuffle and clatter of the microphone equally summons a sense of anticipation, a behind-the-scenes sonic-glimpse into the moment before the broadcast has officially begun. Calling attention to the medium of recorded audio, adjustments to, for example, the mic’s gain are accompanied by casual chatter and laughter in terms that accentuate an experience that is physical and embodied. In addition to the background noises of the kitchen (running water, the chopping of vegetables and the clatter of pots and pans), participant Sam’s admission that (through the attached headphones) the mic is capturing the faint signal of his rumbling tummy – ‘you can hear my stomach’¹⁵ – typifies this sense of physicality to a guttural (also humorous) extent. Thus recalling Stacey Copeland’s discussion of the amplified voice as ‘an intimate aural medium [that] carries with it the possibilities for a deep affective experience’,¹⁶ the audio renders the personal, convivial and physical connection between various group members within and across time and space.

This sense of physical presence is important because the sonic mediation of this social connection occurs in a context plagued by ever-rising depression, anxiety, isolation, and loneliness.¹⁷ Following Molly Robson’s research on the relationship between podcasting and parasocial studies, it’s clear that listeners turn to audio in order to ‘compensate for a lack of social benefits usually acquired in real-world relationships’.¹⁸ From this perspective, the sonic mediation of Soli’s intimate, joyful and embodied social relations is particular to a societal moment in which people are spending increasing amounts of time on social media as a diversion from the stress and distress of life under capitalism.¹⁹ Within an immiserated social climate, the sonic representation of collective, convivial intimacy between real people in the physical realm serves an important political function. Especially given the localized context of the Cashmere Radio broadcast – whereby like-minded listeners are most probably tuning in from the same city – this sounding of local communality becomes a mobilizing invocation to join in and participate. Indeed, at the end of the segment, radio listeners were encouraged to reach out and get involved with the project.

This intersection of sound, solidarity and public space summons Brandon LaBelle’s notion of ‘sonic agency’, which is conceived as a means of:

…enabling new conceptualizations of the public sphere and expressions of emancipatory practices - to consider how particular subjects and bodies, individuals and collectivities creatively negotiate systems of domination.²⁰

Emphasizing both the ‘generative’ nature of sound and the extent to which subjectivity is ‘agitated by the listening sense’,²¹ LaBelle merges this question of political interpellation with the notion of potentiality. Considering how sound reverberates from and through individual subjects and out, into and across the public sphere, his work foregrounds the significance of the sonic to formations of solidarity and the forging of ‘alternative futures’.²² Situating the source of these agentive reverberations of resistance in the ‘acoustics of assembly’ or physical communion, Sonic Agency thus foregrounds the epistemological significance of sounding as a mode that is not only inherently oppositional but also distinctly embodied.²³

Yet, given the reality of a time-pressed existence under capitalism, whereby subjection to wage labor diminishes the remaining hours available for leisure, rest, and political activity, this physical, intimate and embodied experience of joyful communion is only one aspect of collective organizing. Aside from LaBelle’s emphasis on the ‘acoustics of assembly’, the collective work of – as he describes – ‘creatively negotiat[ing] systems of domination’ is fundamentally reliant on remote forms of virtual connection. Despite the atomizing effects of social media, it would be foolish to ignore the efficacy of digital platforms as an organizational tool. Probing the sounding of virtual collaboration via Telegram, Google Sheets, and WhatsApp voice notes, a key aspect to my discussion of this soundwork foregrounds Soli’s use of digital communication. While the grim necessity of such digital dependencies is pitted against the value of physical presence (whereby noise of laughter and other non-linguistic forms of vocal utterance harness the desire for connection in a way that subverts neoliberal modes of parasociality), the reading aloud of group-chat messages and spreadsheet quantities is deconstructed as a mediation of collaborative labor that does not resort to capitalist logics of productivity.

The Virtual

Spreadsheet quote: September 18th: thirty-two portions of lentil diavolo, with baked potato and coriander dressing…
Spreadsheet quote: … food for the ride home and had an easier time dispensing it on the ride home than in front of S-Bahn Hermannstrasse. 24th of August: replaced oil, distro cart-wheel fell off and needs a new nut and bolt…
[Laughter]
Sam: Oh dear
Spreadsheet quote: 28th of August: fastest distro ever! Ten minutes everything was gone. Asked why we weren’t there last week. Need to bring more take-away bags next time. Would be great to have serviettes.²⁴

The laughter in the middle of this excerpt – a silly reaction to the missing nut and bolt of the collective’s cart used to transport and distribute the portions – is another example of how such non-linguistic forms of vocal utterance mediate (/harness a desire for) social connection. However, what I want to draw attention to here is the information recited from the columns of Soli’s shared Google spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is the lifeblood of the project, used to log and organize every aspect of the weekly operation: who’s doing what, how much money is owed to whom, which resources are available and so on. I attribute the idea of including it to participant, scholar, and radio maker Sam Dolbear. While recording, Dolbear suggested we read the document aloud. What followed was an incantatory listing of the types of meals, cost of ingredients, and number of portions Soli prepared and distributed throughout the year of 2023:

Spreadsheet quote: March 6th: twenty-two portions of roast vegetables with potato mash, feta and herb blend. March 13th: dahl with rice and roasted potatoes. March 20th: twenty-four portions of potato gratin, veg stew with herbs and feta. April 10th: thirty portions of dahl with rice and a carrot-radish pickle. April 17th: thirty portions of mujadara with beetroot salad, yogurt and coriander sauce.²⁵

Theorizing the concept of ‘the list’ in a co-authored chapter, it turns out that prior to our recording Dolbear had already given much thought to this inventory mode. Acknowledging the banal practicality of the list ‘when decisions have to be made, structure is needed, or instructions must be followed’, his chapter also locates ‘something ritualized, magical, invocative [in] the act of making a list’.²⁶ As well as documenting individual productivity, the sense of repetition engendered by the form of the list synthesizes these weekly tasks into the work of the collective:

Spreadsheet quote: July the 24th: thirty portions of black bean stew with lime-pickled radish, red onions and cucumber, served on… […]
Spreadsheet quote: A few people stopped by from the street to ask what we were doing, would be good to have a donations jar for passers-by. Quiet on distro cause it was the bank holiday.
Spreadsheet quote: August 14th: fifteen portions of root vegetable coconut casserole, rice and pickled cucumber.
Spreadsheet quote: Police had moved people on earlier that afternoon so it was quiet, we walked down Hermannstrasse towards Leinestrasse to find people. Also, a lot of people wanted bags.²⁷

By reading aloud the notes and messages of other participants, the spreadsheet quotes present a narration of collectivized labor – from the sorting of leftovers to concerns about police presence. This articulation of the spreadsheet’s virtual log was thus a useful way of including Soli participants that did not want to be heard on the radio: sounding each other’s words as a collective, this vocalization of the virtual becomes a sonic manifestation of the everyday labor of mutual organizing.

Another aspect to this vocalization of the virtual is the inclusion of instant messaging voice memos from WhatsApp and Telegram. Soli participants who were unavailable for the group recordings were encouraged to send an audio clip of themselves reflecting on their work as part of the collective. Again, this aspect of polychrony – or, the simple fact of not being available at the same time – is testament to the hectic reality of city life amid work and social commitments. Nevertheless, in contrast to the group recordings (in the kitchen for example), this alternative option gave people the freedom to prepare what they wanted to say and record it in their own time:

Corinna: When you live in a big city, you walk around with kind of some walls up. And… part of that is to protect yourself, and part of that is just because you feel awkward and uncomfortable maybe, talking to strangers. Unless there’s a bridge for you to connect with them. And the great thing about handing out food is that that food is a bridge.²⁸
Ben: I think solidarity and charity can look very different. Charity can have this er… dimension of one-sidedness, where someone is clearly the recipient of support and the other is clearly the benefactor. That can be good and I don’t mean to put it down, but… I think solidarity reimagines that relationship a bit. I think it ideally moves to a place more of common action, thinking like: how can we recognize how our struggles might be entangled or overlapping? And, it feels… like it opens up the range of er, possibilities to help one another, and kind of blurs the line of er, this one-dimensional or one-directional model of care that charity might sometimes entail.²⁹

In this patchwork audio interview, the accounts of these participants are heard as part of a tapestry of voices, a chain of reflections that counters other renderings of online realms (such as the frenetic scroll). Although still products of the digital age – inevitably subject to the system Jodie Dean has described as ‘communicative capitalism’ – these voice messages do not succumb to the obsessive immediacy of continuous feedback loops encapsulated by social media news feeds.³⁰ The colloquial ‘er’, ‘like’ and ‘kind of’ express an alternative virtual mode that is reflective rather than reflexive. In this respect, the voice memos render a digital subjectivity that has not yet been ‘captured’ or coopted by the demands of capital.³¹ While the instant-messaging voice memo (as opposed to the alt-moded answerphone) is generally regarded as a means of communication limited to close, intimate attachments,³² these musings on the Soli collective are not overly individualized or confessional, but explicitly politicized instances of personal reflection on the meaning of collective action. Contrasting with other forms of political organizing that replicate hierarchical cultures of celebrity – by, for example, using social media networks to ‘center charismatic individuals and hide the realities of mass participation’ – the voices of the Soli participants engaged in mutual aid work give audibility to the often unseen and ‘devalued’ aspects of social organizing and reproductive labor.³³

Furthermore, although originally submitted as single waveforms of clean acousmatic speech, in the final production the vocal tracks are bedded by field recordings of the streets and tunnels of Neukölln. Heard amidst a rumbling engine or the whirring doors of a departing tube-train, the voices become rooted in a tangible locality. Subsequently, this vocalization of the virtual not only enables the sounding of polyphonic potential, but presents listeners with a sonic on-the-go expression of how the collective functions day-to-day: remote, amorphous, a-synchronous and – although hyper-local in its material attention to the micro-geography of Neukölln, dispersed – with an impact that reverberates out and across Berlin.

The Public

The inclusion of these messages impacted the sonic composition because, compiled alongside the more lo-fi recording of the kitchen – clashing pans, running water and extractor fans – the lone voices were comparably much better sound quality. Mitigating this disparity, I overlaid field recordings of the Neukölln public (captured on streets and tube platforms) with brief musical inserts of recurring synthesizer motifs.

Listening to these swirling arpeggiators, bassy drones and resonant sound effects – grasping at a sonic link toward the city’s wider public – it is tempting to draw a parallel between these synthy motifs and the liberatory spirit of Berlin club culture. Such an impulse, however, obscures the extent to which the city’s techno scene is largely, not only ‘apolitical, anti-ideological [and] hedonistic’,³⁴ but also imbricated in a whitewashed narrative that perpetuates a simultaneous appropriation and disavowal of Afro-diasporic musical traditions.³⁵ Signaling Jean-Hughes Kabuiku’s attention to the Berlin Clubcommission’s ‘complicity in landlordism’,³⁶ it is impossible to ignore the degree to which the coopted and commodified cultures of dance music now function hand in hand with the gentrifying machine rampaging the city. As the weekend rolls around, spectacles of a gritty urban public – the scenes of homelessness, addiction and poverty that line the U8 platforms – become an edgy backdrop for an increasingly elite set of international partygoers.³⁷ Notwithstanding the visibility and acceptance of LGBTQI* people – which should not be downplayed – concessions made to include at least the optics of racial diversity generally disregard local communities of the city’s long-standing immigrant populations.³⁸

Thus refuting any direct affinity with the ceaseless, ever-commercializing thump of Berlin techno, the soundwork’s playful invocation of electronic music rather recalls Rob Young’s discussion of the way in which millennial glitch music ‘reflects the depletion of “natural” rhythms in the city experience’.³⁹ In this reconfigured hearing, the use of glitch sounds are detected amid the murmuring drones and repetitive arpeggiations, gesturing toward a sonic error: the stunted, misdirected connotations of a worn-out techno-utopianism. Void of an anxious kick-drum – mid and treble frequencies sound out toward a lightness that neither erases nor coopts the bassy rumble of passing traffic. Overlaid with participants’ voices and the everyday sounds of urban living, the sense of synchronicity engendered by these overlapping waveforms enables these electronic sounds to thus become integrated into a sonic impression of the city’s wider public.

As outlined above, the sound of Soli’s collaboration is the noisy backdrop of Hermannstrasse: growling autos, multilingual-pedestrian chatter and the subterranean rattle of tube trains punctuate the collective’s work of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and distribution. As the background noise of the city pervades the audio, the microphone’s proximity to the street is embraced. Quoted in the opening excerpt above, participant Sam’s observation that ‘there’s a lot of background [noise]’ becomes an explicit indication of this fact. Countering R. Murray Schafer’s notion of ‘clairaudience’ or ‘clear hearing’ as an exclusivist ideal that ‘admonishes the “unnatural” sounds of the “loud” industrialized world’,⁴⁰ the exterior noises of the street or train stations sound the process of mutual aid work as collective labor that takes place in so-called ‘low-fi’ urban environments.⁴¹ Following Annie Goh’s critique of Schafer’s work,⁴² it is significant to note that his privileging of the ‘natural soundscape’ above the cacophony of the urban din reinforces the implicit hierarchies of Western dualisms and conjures a distinctly individualized ‘listening subject [who is] normatively white, European and masculine’.⁴³ Without wishing to celebrate the noise or indeed the pollution that emits from up to four lanes of inner-city traffic, my emphasis on the sounding of collectivity nonetheless pinpoints the importance of sounding the urban din as a signifier of broader sociality. Of course, the car is for many reasons an unfitting emblem of such sociality, so – leaving aside discussions surrounding the impact of the A100 Autobahn extension upon Berlin neighborhoods, not to mention the lobbying power of the German motor industry⁴⁴ – I round off by circling back to the Öffis⁴⁵; specifically, the contested space of Berlin’s U8.

Particularly during the winter months, much of Soli’s food is distributed inside the underground stations of the U8. Barrier-free (you don’t need a ticket to enter), these platforms are not simply transient spaces for passengers to pass through, but unofficial sites of shelter and congregation for people who are unhoused, experiencing addiction and other forms of exclusion and precarity. It is common to see people winding their way through train carriages, traversing the length of platforms, requesting cash, collecting plastic bottles to deposit, seeking something to eat or drink. However, as noted above, this Neukölln section of the U8 underground line is currently subject to a brutal regime of social cleansing, which in turn directly impacts Soli’s distribution:

Sarah: There were always police or like BVG or cops in the station, and sometimes you get to a station and there’s no one there and obviously it’s just been […] like they’ve just chucked everyone out. But there used to never never never be that at [S+U-Bahnhof] Hermannstrasse. […] And then there were suddenly police patrols like all the time.⁴⁶
Spreadsheet quote: Police had moved people on earlier that afternoon so it was quiet.⁴⁷
Spreadsheet quote: The Deutsche Bahn Sicherheit people came by, they said what we’re doing was great, however we shouldn’t allow people to eat in front of the entrance. We can distribute, but the people shouldn’t eat there. Otherwise we can’t do what we’re doing.⁴⁸

Sarah’s testimony and the subsequent spreadsheet quotes capture a widespread sense (among the collective) that these police clear-outs of people experiencing homelessness and/or addiction on the U8 trains and platforms are, around the time of recording in March 2024, occurring with increasingly regularity (a hunch that fits with the measures announced by the city’s transport authority BVG in February that same year).⁴⁹ Despite the hint of sympathy from some Deutsche Bahn security guards, there persists a generalized sense that the people Soli is attempting to help exist beyond the realm of public acceptability. Un-ticketed, unhoused, undesirable: neoliberal consensus demands that such people are ‘not part of the public’.⁵⁰ As noted by Karen Foster and Dale Spencer, adhering to a ‘cultural script of disgust’,⁵¹ the abjection of people experiencing addiction and homelessness is predicated on a politically determined existence ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’.⁵²

This soundwork does not feature such voices, but rather – perhaps lamentably so – a more privileged array of English-speaking internationals, such as myself. To quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the unspeaking subaltern, ‘the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow’.⁵³ This sentiment also arises in Julia Kristeva’s contention that ‘The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I’: in this construction, the Self-Other opposition facilitates the Self’s subjectivation.⁵⁴ Yet, as this article has attested, where possible this experimental soundwork presents listeners with an attempt to decenter individual voices, sounding instead the Soli participants as members of a collective who believe that solidaristic action in aid of society’s most marginalized constitutes a reckoning with the reality of what it means to occupy the Berlin public. Refusing the ‘cultural script of disgust’, this solidarity recognizes the way in which – despite very real differences stemming from, for example, race and/or class inequities – we are all victims of a system that predisposes us to increasing atomization and precarity. My use of first-person plural here is cautious but deliberate: in making this point, I by no means wish to equate the struggles of those traumatized by poverty, displacement, war, persecution and genocide with the anxious apathy of more upwardly mobile individuals with secure claims to EU residence/citizenship, but rather locate a shared cause in opposition to the alienation, immiseration and injustice that impacts society as a whole (albeit in vastly different ways). In light of the fact that EU and US-American immigrants have been threatened with deportation due to their role in protest movements for the liberation of Gaza, a key internationalist dimension emerges when one considers this move as a deliberate attempt by Berlin authorities to impede solidarity with the city’s Muslim communities (who are routinely subject to deportation threats).⁵⁵

As cuts to the city’s social and public services only intensify,⁵⁶ Soli’s unconditional provision of hot food does not target, fetishize or objectify a single community or demographic, but resists a binary between recipients and volunteers in recognition of shared humanity. Furthermore, while the homelessness and addiction that surrounds the underground stations of the U8 provides crucial context for the regime of social cleansing, it is once again important to reiterate that many people who accept Soli’s meals are by no means out of work, unhoused or dependent on illicit substances. In this respect, the tactical potential of experimental audio is relevant to a broader context whereby urban measures of redevelopment, fiscal austerity, gentrification and social cleansing are part of a global phenomenon integral to the functioning of neoliberal capitalism.⁵⁷ Whether listened to individually or in a communal setting – such as the oft-frequented studio space at Cashmere Radio, which is open to the public three days a week – experimental audio has the capacity to bring its listeners into a productive encounter with their surroundings. Returning to LaBelle’s concept of ‘sonic agency’ and his focus on ‘hearing [as] the basis for an insurrectionary activity’, I conclude by emphasizing the significance of sound as a form of mediation that, in releasing listeners from the screen of their smartphone, ‘works to unsettle and exceed arenas of visibility’.⁵⁸

In this soundwork, as in the wider Berlin public, the voices of society’s margins are left unheard. Yet, audible throughout the piece is the U8 train. Resounding against the voiceless space of the city’s most marginalized, its locomotion sounds the discomforting reality of collective organizing in the present moment. Subject to grinding measures of fiscal austerity, plagued by scenes of misery and drug dependency, and – on a more abstract level – confined to the same old tracks that do not lead anywhere new: the metropolitan underground train symbolizes a repetitive cycle, an unproductive impasse, a collective lack. At the same time, representative of the reliable, affordable, and functional potential of a public service, this grimy beacon of inner-city transit is also an emblem of progress, sociality and carbon-neutral mobility. As the soundwork ends, the sounding of a broader sociality fades out with glitchy repetitions of automated speech: ‘U8 nach Wittenau, nach Wittenau, nach Wittenau’.⁵⁹ Resisting the elevation of individual participants, the listener is left with the reverberative malfunctions of a public service. Despite the signaling of a grave error, the soundwork ends by insisting upon the significance of this interruptive potential, refusing to deny the possibility – and indeed the necessity – of collective, reparative, and transformative social change.