Listening With: Alethea Pace is an ethnographic performance “in the middle” of an embodied, community, archival, and land-based artmaking process. As Pace’s collaborator, neighbor, and friend, I look from the inside out and outside in (Collins, 1986), as I navigate the body, land, community, and archive in the Bronx—the four pillars of her Listening With framework—from my position as a Ph.D. student and researcher in North Carolina.

With more questions than answers, and as I wrestle within the limits of Western time, I begin to tell a story about Pace, the Harlem River, and what it means for me to “Listen With” the River, as we co-create, teach, and learn. This performance is a bridge between body, land, community, and archive. As I move through space and time in an attempt to listen with the Harlem River, I also include my interlocutors on stage with me; drawing together footage of Pace and the Harlem River, I layer ethnopoetic narrations and River sounds into this performed inquiry. My body moves in front of a video installation, and as I physically interpret the questions that have arisen during my process of Listening With, I cast a shadow onto the screen, representing the onto-epistemological absences inherent to my human perspective (Kimmerer, 2013; Wölfle Hazard, 2022). Unresolved and caught in the dams of time (Adjaye, 1994), I hold the tensions, contradictions, and openings of being betwixt and between, place and understanding, holding onto the question: When I Listen With Alethea Pace and the River, what shifts, what remains, and what emerges?