Wherever I Am, Nevertheless You Are

An Autoethnographic Soundwork

Abstract

“Wherever I Am, Nevertheless You Are” is a sonic autocartography built from a zine I created in the spring of 2024 entitled “My Dinner with Diaspora.” The zine follows myself, a 1.5-generation Pilipinx-Canadian migrant, haunted into having dinner with my five-year-old self right before immigrating from Manila to Toronto. My web of diasporic identity grew after I moved from Toronto to Vancouver for graduate school. This sound work explores my multisensory experiences in Manila, Toronto, and Vancouver through bodies of water and social networks. While I satisfy longings for Manila’s saltwater seas through Vancouver’s Pacific shores, I developed my sense of Pilipinx identity within Toronto’s lakes and diasporic communities. In this piece, I express the ways these waterscapes compound to form my feelings of everywhere/nowhereness as a Pilipinx migrant. The work consists of a score I have arranged, including the sounds of synthetic and acoustic instruments, conversation, my childhood voice, the movement of water, and meals I have shared. In the accompanying text, I reflect on what is generated from the convergence of imaginaries where my senses in one location conjure memories of another, and memories cement with the discovery of diaspora anew.