Notes for the Living (2025) is an essay written within the Listenings publication (edited by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson), which is in response to the video piece NDN Love Songs by Peter Morin, as Performed by Charlena Russell within Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, presented at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Reflecting on my own experience of degenerative hearing loss, I use the essay to consider the complex role of sound in processes of learning, cultural transmission, and memory.
The essay attends closely to Morin’s work as a site of resonance between material objects, performance, and honouring Indigenous knowledge systems. Through the analysis of Morin’s hand drum videos, and Russell’s responsive live musical interpretation, my essay addresses themes of access, loss, kinship, and the responsibilities of listening. I position sound not only as something heard, but as something felt, held, and carried across bodies, time, and relations—foregrounding the urgency of sustaining living knowledge beyond institutional frameworks.
Citation: MacDonald, Logan. “Notes for the Living.” Listenings, edited by Candice Hopkins et al., Gund Gallery, 2025, pp. 106–109.
