Notes on first meeting in Berlin (February 2020)
With Arkadi Zaides, Alex Reynolds, Brandon LaBelle
Social acoustics / sonic practices, questions of listening, sound as materiality – as relational matter: enabling forms of orientation, an-orientation; “communities in movement” as topic or framework: what constitutes community, and how might community emerge as a process of movement: within the break, as threshold identities; putting concepts of community on the move.
Question of “fiction” (emerges): communities, as work / portrait process: fiction allows for a portrait to emerge; provides a different space; malleability: working with actors as people; process of discovery: between artist and those involved.
Fiction sets in motion a type of action / performative; a story that helps us be together.
“Fiction as Method” anthology (Sternberg press) /
The question: “how are you invited” / “how does one invite” – to approach communities, to be in community, to work at and around community.
Film on Spanish factory; self-run company; finding common points between artist and subject. Aernout Mik: the construction of scenes, fictions, catastrophes; playgrounds: fictions that make at social dynamics – social structures in movement (the emergency crew).
Listening: sound in relation to documentary: how you “objectify” a community; issue of power; listening as what sets the conditions of mutuality: impingement.
Rosine Mbakam / intimate documentaries in Cameroon; “decolonizing the gaze”; working at and against the relation between documentary (anthropology) and colonial othering.
Black Wave cinema director: Želimir Žilnik, on the marginal; “shadow citizens”: bringing the marginal home.
Issue of the archive of violence (human rights abuse): the camera that provokes tension: the “body cam” (police) vs. the “mobile cam” (public) – image provocation.
Drone journalism; question of borders and security; technologies of securitization of European borders; google earth aesthetics: forensic architecture and the question of “evidence”.
The migrant crisis: haunted voices, haunted bodies: bodies that should haunt us: “Return to the Postcolony” (TJ Demos). Evoking the ghost – letting the ghost speak: the drowned, the missing, the ones who do not make it to Europe, or who remain noncitizen.
List of migrant deaths (The List): as archive – how do you read this? what questions do you pose to it? Without names: who gets named, who gets identified? Politics of “the livable life”; the ghosts are arriving – the experience of walking among the dead / where is the border: the migrant carries the border (Necropolis, Necroscape). (Kim Rygiel: emergent practices within Necropolis)
I enter Necropolis by dying; I become a citizen by drowning.
How does one mourn through data (the List); ethics related to data; how to respond to data.
What is the acoustics of Necropolis?
“Lost Children Archive”, Valeria Luiselli.
Is making visible enough? Far right politics: being exposed doesn’t matter (Wikileaks; Trump impeachment); questioning Rancière: to what extent does “disagreement” matter? To what extend does “the political” matter? (Harney / Moten: politics as “corrective”)
“Checkpoint Watch”: groups of women; case against European countries for migrant crisis; justice work: transnational systems: global judicial work?
Association of witnesses: attending court hearing; the right to listen; the responsibility to listen; after visibility: feminist practices of daily care (opening up to other paths of engagement, of attending to others: another economy of attention).
French courts: the figure of the Rappeur / court of appeals; the one who presents the defendant: practice of narrating the defendant.
Blind justice: listening is essential to impartiality.
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Seminar: Arkadi Zaides, Alex Reynolds, Brandon LaBelle, Julia Tieke, Zorka Wollny, Agata Lisiak, Allegra Solitue, Omar Kasmani, Sara Gebran, Achim Lengerer (February 2020 at Liebig12, Berlin): free discussion following presentation by Omar Kasmani, on “audible intimacies”.
What are the limits of listening; how do we listen? Intentional listening: I hear what I want to hear; to see with eyes closed: “I swear I saw this” (Taussig); I swear I heard this.
Question of “recognition”: esteem; respect: to be listened to (the ethical researcher); what happens when you exit the field? The necessity to “trespass”; the duty to be irresponsible (as artist, as researcher: to not stop recording); relation to “noise” as interruption – noise as what allows other narratives to occur.
Question of “sonic mise-en-scene”: the acoustic arrangements; the microphonic-dispositif; courtroom infrastructures: case of Munich trial.
Noise: the notion of “the stranger” (Flusser); the stranger interrupts the narratives of homeland (Heimat) by asking for directions; question of civil disobedience; behave as if you have the freedom: prefigurative listening – I hear what must be heard.
The worldly / the elsewhere: places referring to other places: the acoustic passage between the divine and the worldly, the spectral and the terrestrial; sound facilitates, exceeds physical space, to generate other conversations and affinities; to hear “solidarity” – noise from the balconies.
Sound as a trafficker.
Exercising silence as a social right; a social weapon; to reshape the social configuration and the order of the usual: sound can insist upon something: to punctuate; I am here. To interrupt the continuity of the usual; a queer presence – love.
Humming as protection: sound takes you away, and it brings you back: echolocation; vibration: I remember, I project.
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Final thoughts, paths:
How do we move as communities? What is the relation between community and movement?
The notion of “feedback” as what can produce relations across “the border”: an affective resonance; relate to questions of “the settled” and “the unsettled”: the colonized and the decolonized; we are already moving.
Gesture… the hand as a figure: gestural matrices – sign, stitch, drum. The hand that sings, the hand that listens.
Touch.