STABZ was a sonic installation proposed by Juan Castrillon and Christopher Mulford and developed with other grad students and community members at Van Pelt Library on April 11th, 2016. That Monday afternoon, ten people accessed the library and made their way to the stairwell located at the southwest side of the building.

For ten minutes, each of them was circulating, leaving and entering the place multiple times while their voices assembled and unraveled one another into a sonic texture composed of the selected excerpts of literature and music they had previously chosen. For ten minutes, each of them realized what was going on in their action because the egocentric mode of silent reading was unfolded and amplified by their voices in a reverberant space. Our installation was intended to make audible reader's voices and the thoughtful relations they have with texts without leaving the library.

During the performance not only the prohibition of raising the voice challenged the pattern of behavior inside this reading institution, but also the way in which knowledge circulated and the mode how participants experienced it. In this sense, and we asked how the tension between silence and cacophony in the library resembles gentrification, in which circulation and experience are unequally distributed.

In sum, the sonic event folded a different character for the only place at the library where the presence of acoustically absorptive materials is nil: the stairwell. During few minutes, it turned into a landscape through listening to our voices, sounding subjectivity in multiple languages, and negotiating affect and intelligibility.