URBAN SOUNDS: Nature, Animals, Humans, Machines
Sounds recorded in shared spaces around the World, by artists, researchers, curators for R22 Art Radio.
Sounds recorded in shared spaces around the World, by artists, researchers, curators for R22 Art Radio.
The “Sakhra Encounters” took place from March 15. to 17. 2019 at Abdeljalil Saouli’s home in Moulay Bouchta el Khamar, a village of the Pre-Rif region in Morocco. The main purpose of the event was to gather artists, researchers, activists, friends, family members and supporters for a shared moment of collective exchange and reflection. It emerged from a collaborative research on local ecologies of building, cultivating and listening, together with Abdeljalil Saouli’s desire to reflect on his own experience in daily life and art practice in the country side. During three days, people actively participated in a program of exhibitions, performances, workshops, walks, discussions and convivial meetings, of which we present here a fragmentary account in sound and images. Coming together in this relatively marginalized area of Morocco felt perfect in order to openly address the vexed relationship between art practitioners and institutions in general, along with wider concerns regarding the boundary-making ideologies that govern human and well as non-human lives. The ‘political’, in this case, emerged not only from the ‘personal’, but also from the ‘togetherness’ of the Sakhra Encounters, albeit without a plan.
The Sakhra Encountersis an artist-run initiative by Abdeljalil Saouli, Gilles Aubry and Carlos Perez Marin. Guest artists: Said Afifi, Mustapha Akrim, Mohamed Arejdal, Ramia Beladel, Nasrine Kheltent, Younes Rahmoun.
Following a walk in the village surroundings, the participants gathered in a sand cave for a group discussion. In the first audio excerpt, the artist and project host Abdeljalil Saouli speaks about his decision to move back to the village where he grew up after studying fine arts in Tetouan. He describes the process of building a house on the mountain designed according to his own needs, wondering also if it is the rocks and the mountain that were domesticated in the process, or the opposite.
In this audio excerpt, the participants discuss the nomadic condition of the contemporary artist. They address the necessity to partly decenter art practices outside of urban centers and institutions in order to unlearnacademic modes of thinking and boundary-making. This allows for a better ‘digesting of certain questions’ at a personal level, and for a redistribution of the sensible towards human and non-human minorities, which can only happen through concrete actions at the level of a community.
Several workshops for kids took place as part of the Sakhra Encounters, led by students in art and architecture. For one of them the roles were reversed, with an initiation to ‘stone throwing’ given by local kids. As a crucial skill for the remote guiding of sheep herds, stone throwing also has an important sonic dimension, as can be heard in the recording.
Departing from the yearly celebration of the local saint (moussem) in Moulay Bouchta, the piece provides a stage for a performance by the artist Ramia Beladel, as an inner introspection and progressive reconfiguration of her own self, breath by breath, balloon after balloon. The 40′ piece was heard during a collective listening session under a tent, as an additional form of interaction with the village inhabitants. According to Suzy Golnik, empathic listening participates in community building and makes art ‘socially responsive’, comparable also to a ‘healing power’.
Artworks were installed inside village homes in an attempt to highlight formal and material connections with the architecture, questioning also the boundaries between art, environment and everyday life. The exhibition included works by Mustapha Akrim, Said Afifi, Gilles Aubry, Younès Rahmoun, and Abdeljalil Saouli.
For their sound installation “Becoming Goat”, Gilles Aubry and Abdeljalil Saouli used a special ‘binaural’ recording technique in order to capture the auditive perspective of a goat, who is possibly revealed as a «person» with her own subjectivity.
Video : « STONESOUND » to the link : https://vimeo.com/344771563
STONESOUND is the result of an experiment by Aubry and Saouli in « stone sounding », both in the sense of exploring stone acoustics, and of investigating the limits of ‘things not yet known’. Guided by Saouli’s words, the spectator attends to the artist’s way of relating to stones, as part of a larger local ecology of co-evolution between humans and the environment.
Some of the participating artists contributed through direct intervention in the landscape of Moulay Bouchta. The installation “Point-de-repère” by Mustapha Akrim perhaps attests for the necessity of stable reference points as part of the nomadic condition of contemporary individuals. This necessity is further echoed in the futurist-looking sculpture “Markaba” by Younès Rahmoun, conceived as a portablespace for meditation. The recording documents a vocal performance by the artist Imane Zoubai inside the sculpture, interacting with its resonant acoustics in another instance of collective listening.
Sharing food and music making is central to connective aesthetics, as it fosters mutual care, affect and inclusion. Food was generously prepared and offered to all the participants by the Saouli family during the three days. On the last evening, the village women joined in for a shared moment of collective music, dance and celebration, until the next edition of the Sakhra Encounters.
La R22 art radio continue à élargir le cercle des dialogues avec les artistes et le public, en présentant le guide audio des expositions de L’appartement 22 et en diffusant les œuvres sonores et documents et les mettant en accès libre a tous. Karim Rafi décrit le projet ainsi : L’idée est de convertir un lieu en instrument de mesure sismique, pour en étudier les phénomènes constitués de différentes formes d’ondes qui le traversent.
En installant divers capteurs, micros et autres instruments de mesure acoustique et sismique, en modifiant et en modulant ces formes d’ondes, le dispositif qui semble vivant (ronflant) produit de nouveaux sons et des ondes, métamorphosant ainsi l’état physique (acoustique) du lieu.
Cette interaction entre le dispositif et le milieu qu’il modifie produit une forme de dialogue ondulatoire à différentes amplitudes ; transformant l’espace en question en un espace sonore interactif aléatoire, invitant le public à méditer ses gestes, mouvements, actions et à penser le monde comme la somme d’interconnexions complexes sans frontières, un tout, une biosphère rhizomatique ondulatoire.
Gabriella Ciancimino produced this sound work for R22 as part of the Radio For Example program, curated by Juan A. Gaitan and Abdellah Karroum (Curatorial Delegation) for MDE11 in Medellin in 2011.
A temporary recording studio at Contour Biennale 8’s Opening Weekend Public Programme / DAI Roaming Assembly #12, Café Univers draws on conversations, music and live internet/FM radio feeds from across the globe to dialogue freely around sound, place and histories of struggle. The episodes navigate mainstream radio stations via the Radio Garden website as well as music chosen by presenters. The project melds sonic exploration of south/south solidarity and the collapsing of physical/digital spaces vis a vis the chaotic dynamics of listening to the radio while rotating the globe.
Café Univers is a project conducted by Syma Tariq and Francesca Savoldi and supported by R22 RadioAppartement22
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Episodes 1, 2 & 3: Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam have been making films together for three decades on the recurrent subject of Tibet, in which they are intimately involved.They chat with us about the music of their film ‘Drapchi Elegy‘ and the songs performed and recorded by a group of nuns imprisoned for protesting peacefully. We chat as well about the role of radio in the Tibetan diaspora, music of exile and the meaning of its contemporary influences.
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Episodes 4 & 5: Karrabing Film Collective are from the Belyuen community on the Cox Peninsula across Darwin Harbour, Australia. They took up filmmaking after being made homeless, and use media as a means to express protection for their ancestors, sacred sites and mother country. The films represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of indigeneity. Gavin Bianamu, Rex Edmunds and Elizabeth A. Povinelli speak to us about filming, family, Australian radio music and screwing copyright.
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Episodes 6 & 7: Denise Ferreira da Silva offered at Contour Biennale 8’s Public Programme notes on a theory of transformative justice, assessing contemporary (total, institutional, symbolic) violence and raciality while interrogating a value-based proposal for practical decolonisation (ie, construing and then demanding the wealth back). She speaks to Café Univers about Brazilian radio novelas, cultural value extraction and hip hop, among other personal subjects.
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Episode 8: Pedro Neves Marques is (together with Mariana Silva) behind inhabitants – an online channel for exploratory video and reporting. He comments on one of the works presented at Contour Biennale 8, ‘Hobby Lobby vs. The Allegory of Justice’, which revolves around an interesting case from 2014 in the US, where corporations claimed for the first time their religious rights to suppress providing health care and contraceptives to employees. Travelling together though Radio Garden we try to find evidence of the Trump era on US airwaves.
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Episode 9: A chat with Mariana Silva, co-founder of inhabitants with Pedro Neves Marque. She is a Portuguese artist based in New York. As well as navigating Radio Garden with us through night radio broadcasts and transmissions from the Azorean archipelago, she connects some of the works produced for Contour Biennale 8 with her reflections on the US Women’s March on Washington, which took place on March 8 2017.
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Episode 10: Pedro Gómez-Egaña drops by to tell us about the piece he produced for Contour Biennale 8 and related research that explores the complex tradition of riddles in polyphonic manuscripts of the Flemish region, and the enigmatic silence they contain. Continuing with the task of listening, we tune into the airwaves of his homeland, Bucaramanga (Colombia). Pedro is an artist whose recent works gravitate around questions of temporality in the intersection between technology and culture.
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Episode 11: A recording of the last eight minutes of Rana Hamadeh‘s soundplay, « Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash For Your Girls? » (40″). Structured through the oratorical tradition of the Shiite ceremony of Ashoura, it takes its political, military and legal expressions with the Lebanese/Syrian contexts as its field for commentary and research. Centred around the murder of Hussain, the Prophet’s grandson, it is a terrible and beautiful mixture of vocal trauma and dark trance. Headphones advised.
Dix ans après sa première résidence d’artiste à L’appartement 22, Mustapha Akrim revient sur les lieux avec un projet grandiose, ambitieux et sonore. Il explore notre relation au monde et à l’histoire à travers une conscience aiguë du présent -espace et temps- dans lequel l’œuvre se construit, utilisant les matériaux de construction pour la lecture d’un possible passé. L’artiste développe un projet en deux chapitres, utilisant les images historiques comme élément de réflexion sur la mémoire collective, des histoires plus que parfaites. Le public est appelé à “découvrir” les scènes cachées, l’exposition “Histoires plus que parfaites” se construit dans la durée de l’excavation des éléments par chaque visiteur.
More information:
http://www.appartement22.com/spip.php?article445
The Big One opening performance by Hassan Khan
Concert organized at Palais Bahia, with R22 Art Radio and L’appartement 22
راديو الشقة 22 يقدم حسن خان مع أجدد انتاجاته الموسيقية الواحدة الكبيرة سهرة مع شعبي مصري معاصر و صوتيات إلكترونية 19/11/2009 19:00 R22 Art Radio presents Hassan Khan live in concert with his latest set The Big One new wave synth-shaabi and toneworks.
At Palais Bahia, Hassan Khan performs his piece « The Big One. » This set juxtapozes original, hardcore, synth-based, experimental shaabi workouts with delicately wrought tonal compositions. All live instrumentals were generated in a series of late-night recording sessions with shaabi musicians and arrangers. For one central track in the introduction of the piece, Khan asked a professional popular singer,usually a performer at weddings, to scream and sing anything, imagining himself in the presence of a deaf audience; the singer is pushed to hysteric screams, screaming unintelligible words.
Thanks to Hassan Khan
A project in collaboration with A-I-T and L’apparteemnt 22
Fadma Kaddouri invited Isa Stragliati to a collaborative work between sound matter and word matter.The poem « Running and Getting Lost in the sky » is an ode to life for those who today are on the seas, the roads of exile fleeing war, fear and their aftermath of dehumanization. In the poem the wind is omnipresent, it is the allegory that manifests itself in the freedom to be in its possibilities of realization, it represents hope.
Les Anneaux de saturne – expériences
Gentrification ségrégation spéculation déclin émergence
ou comment les villes modernes sont la représentation miniaturisée du monde.
Les nouvelles représentations de l’espace urbanistique et du monde via les nouvelles technologies réduit le monde en un espace virtuel non sensible nous pouvons ainsi déambuler à travers l’endroit de notre choix n’ayant comme limite que la technologie. Ici c’est une pièce dont le titre est inspiré de phénomènes astrophysiques représentant les luttes qui se manifestent dans ces espaces mondes comme espace politique Créations sonores, pic nique, déambulation, modification d’objets urbains en objets artistiques, transformation de lieux frontières en passerelles, des lieux transitoires en lieux d’art.
Création d’espace d’émergences d’expériences poétiques esthétiques et politiques sont des tentatives de transformation de ces rapports virtuels au monde et du temps de circulation en lieu, finalement de circulation d’idées.
Karim Rafi