October 19, 2020

Fireworks, Bronx, NY, USA on 21st June 2020 – by Ariana Martinez

“This past June, at least in the US, there was a sense that the fireworks going off well into the night, every night, across neighbourhoods in major cities were a kind of psychological warfare tactic deployed by the police to wear down the energy of protestors engaging in the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Or, alternately, being set off to deliberately attract police attention to certain neighborhoods. These speculations aside, the fireworks were producing a lot of anxiety at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/nyregion/fireworks-every-night-nyc.html
Whether these speculations were “true” or not is kind of irrelevant to me because the feeling that these fireworks were ominous or threatening rather than celebratory lingers simply due to their time and place. This is a recording I made as I stood at my window on the night of June 21, 2020. These huge, professional grade fireworks were being set off on my street, loud enough to rattle the walls.”  

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