Altering Nativism is a project that integrates research, exhibition and publication; it proposes a construction of knowledge and conception of history based on the experience of listening—an investigation into the experience of the “sound culture” in Taiwan—and hopes to discover the meaning conveyed and advocated by this “sound culture.”

In Taiwanese modern history, the Japanese colonization opened the door to the experience of modernity in Taiwan, and this process had been through constant vicissitudes of political powers. From the post-war period to the imposition of martial law and its lifting, people faced continuation and discontinuation in all kinds of experience and perception all the time. The fabrication of history has structured in people’s consciousness complex and multiple realities in different time and space as well as in perception. If we view the memory of sounds as a kind of perceptual experience existing in between the private and the public domain, would it be possible to conjure up the sense of history hidden in everyone’s consciousness through the representation of sound as well as its documentation, literature and art exhibition?

Additionally, if we should view sounds—the musical as well as the non-musical—as an expressive form of a human’s mind, would an understanding of the social progress from making sounds to listening to them provide us an alternative channel to comprehend the individual or collective condition in history? Would it further reinforce the construction of the “imperceptible conception of history,” resurrecting our thinking about the cultural condition of place, of identification and even of the times?

Based on these questions, this project intended to take “sounds” as a force of thinking, and would like to travel through time and space, transcend all language barriers, revive the forgotten bodily perception and reexamine our current condition of existence and reality through this medium of perception, “sounds.”