This Master’s thesis is based on a web-based multimedia project titled, “Soundscapes of Pandemia,” created during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and global Black Lives Matter uprisings. A question guiding the design of this multimedia project that this Master’s thesis considers is, “How can art and collaborative research design critically engage, with current historic moments?” By critical engagement, I mean how can people actively and carefully consider stimuli such as sounds as a means of producing knowledge about current moments and their relationship to possible futures in the urban environment. As an artist, activist, and researcher, I curate visual illustrations and collage the soundscapes in web-space guided by a decolonial practice of counter- mapping and emergent strategy. A collective of submissions qualified a synesthetic multimedia project expressing counter-hegemonic ontologies in transnational urban contexts of Sao Paulo, Leipzig, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, ranging from audio files to audio & video files of varying formats and lengths from nine people. A total of 41 files were submitted by the people in the network and were transmitted from smartphone devices and a GoPro camera utilizing broadband fiber connections. I assert that by engaging with actual and virtual media through magical realism is to engage in imagining future possibilities outside of hegemonic hierarchical and temporal orders.

This dissertation takes an emic approach to understanding collaborative processes between Native and Indigenous peoples and neoliberal institutions such as universities, design-studios, and museums using arts-based research and production methods and modalities of expression. Qualitative analysis of four auto-ethnographic examples represents an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon that can be considered art (Clifford 1986: 3-4). Each chapter includes stories embedded within the auto-ethnographic account which reflects attributes of decolonial de-linking (Mignolo 2007) that Indigenous aesthetics perform through axiological innovations (Bang et al 2015). I analyze the embedded ethnographic data in which I am a participant, collaborator, ally, and interviewer, utilizing a decolonial framework to understand how aesthetics are expressed, understood and transgressed by Indigenous peoples to proclaim past, present and emerging worldviews (Topa & Narvaez 2022). As a critical and reflexive ethnographic methodology, I begin with a feminist standpoint theoretical analysis to account for my position as a Xicana Indígena (Zepeda 2022). Thus, I propose an embodied and distributed ethos for collaborating with Native and Indigenous people that I term rightful relations. Building on the framework defined as rightful presence (Calabrese Barton & Tan 2020) that is a justice-oriented political project, focusing on the processes of reauthoring rights towards making present the lives of those made missing. I emphasize the “rights,” that people have to assert themselves as Native and Indigenous peoples through the pursuit of aesthetic sovereignty. It is this pursuit of aesthetic sovereignty and self-determination that bears the potential to be transformative–it is this transformative power that rightful relations illustrate a dynamic within aesthetic systems that is integral to Indigenous peoples’ kinship-based worldviews and embodiments.