A Picó is a sound system created in the 1960s on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Since then, a culture of street music, parties, and battles through these devices has developed and continues to this day. La Bandida and la Ácida are a queer feminist diaspora of this picó heritage. They are now the sonic embodiment of migration from the south tropical globe to the north globe.

 

Privilege and power are utterly the loudest and most destructive weapons. So we feminists don't need to be one single speaker. We can spread all over the place as unapologetic sound bombs of denouncement. La Bandida and la Ácida are ready to make noise and reverb. Sometimes together and sometimes against each other because we must show up for brutal conflicts. But always together against bigotry.

 

Yes, we feminists are angry and full of life, caring love, and joyful rebelliousness. We are unsettling for the most privileged, and we want that. We feminists incarnate paradox. We are capable of holding multiple truths within. We can dance in the turbulent waters of multiplicity. We grow from rupture and cracking. We feminisms are in conflict because power relations are still not wholly acknowledged and deconstructed.

 

People from the north: assume your power, accept your damage. Open your ears and chests. Listen to other truths.

 

Can you hear the WHITE noise?

 

Yet, even if we drift, our call is to cooperate, honour our ancestors in resistance, and revolt against patriarchy. La Ácida and La Bandida are this beating. This revolt is not clean, not ordered, and not predictable. Our

revolt beats and screams and melts. Our revolt is theorised and practised from the guts and has little to do with patriarchal institutional standards.

 

Our revolt is now under construction.

Can you feel the sound?

 

Text by: Lina Bravo Mora

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Graphic Design: John Haag