• Thu 06 08 2020 / 7 pm •
radio in between spaces
edition #13
With NATHALIE ANGUEZOMO MBA BIKORO, LISTENING AT PUNGWE
Black A(n)thena (Kosmos) by Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro explores practices of listening and radio as means to decolonize and untrain the ear from hegemonic listening knowledge. Drawing on material from piracy radios, Black A(n)thena follows the entangled histories of German settlements and anti-colonial struggles in Gabon and elsewhere. The artists follow the multiple traces of writer and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso, who reappears on a banana plantation in Gabon as the goddess “Camissonae”, while nature transmits testimonies and warnings to the plantation laborers. Black A(n)thena draws on the role of the scientific perpetrator rather than the native as subject and counter-reacts to the technologies of sound recordings and transmissions used in the early 20th century.
Listening at Pungwe – the joint project of Namibian historian Memory Biwa and sound artist Robert Machiri – also trace German colonialism in their radiophonic lecture performance “Dzimudzangara: A Spectral Figuration of Archival Voices”. The tale is of Kingigitile ‘Bokero’ Ngwale, who — possessed by the spirit-medium, Hongo — recruits fighters against the German invaders. The piece takes unexpected turns as the artists overlay many decades of vinyl recordings with songs, poetry and their momentary gestures into the past.
Sonic Perspectives from the Global South. Sounding Hospitalities. Time, Sound and Emancipatory Practices. Radio as Activism.
In sonic lectures, live performances, conversations, compositions, documentaries, and radio plays, radio in between spaces is exploring the interplay of sound, public and private space, activist and artistic practice. International sound artists and experimental musicians, philosophers and theorists, critics and journalists examine questions of foreignness and proximity, solidarity and dissonance, vibration and materiality, meaning and noise, permeability and resistance.
Editorial team: THOMAS GLÄSSER, JAN LANGHAMMER, THERESE SCHULEIT, FRANZISKA WINDISCH
radio in between spaces is a cooperation of ZAM Zentrum für aktuelle Musik e.V. with Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World), Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and the Experimental Radio of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and its projects bauhaus.fm and shift.fm. Supported by the TURN fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Kunststiftung NRW and Kulturamt der Stadt Köln.
