Antonia Wright: State of Labor

Through a multidisciplinary practice involving video, performance, photography, sculpture, sound, and light, Antonia Wright (b. 1979, Miami; lives in Miami) responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as they relate to systems of power in society. 

State of Labor is a generative sound art composition—a form of music or sound that creates itself from an initial set of musical elements defined by the composer and/or a system—that uses data sonification to protest the changing laws around access to safe and legal abortions. This work was made in response to the United States Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. As a result, abortions became illegal in numerous states that have since implemented partial or complete bans on the procedure, a condition that disproportionately affects low-income people of color and minorities who are most vulnerable to the new laws, having to travel farther distances for abortion care, seek unsafe procedures, or be forced to carry unwanted or dangerous pregnancies to term. State of Labor sonifies data relating to these issues, including the increase in mileage a person will have to journey as their unwanted pregnancy progresses. Partnering with midwives, Wright has collected the sounds people make during active labor, including recordings of her own home birth experience in 2015.

​​The code is programmed so that when a data point in the algorithm reaches the average one-way driving distance a person has to travel to receive reproductive care, the softer sounds a pregnant person makes between contractions in labor are played. Then, when this average one-way driving distance increases as the result of state abortion bans, the sound installation plays the powerful, raw, guttural noises that accompany a contraction. Data for the algorithm was obtained by the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and policy organization on sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide. The sounds are as personal as are the real-life effects of the Supreme Court decision. Wright, a mother of two, hopes to galvanize those who believe in the self-determination of human beings over their own bodies and against compulsory parenthood.

Credit: Overview from museum website