Locating Sounds

Aadita Chaudhury, Julianne Chua, Maria Giaever Lopez (withdrew). Host: Stas Shärifulla

00:00

Free entry

The third and final RND module is hosted by Stas Shärifullin (Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW).

Scottish Cityscapes, Cultural Lifeways, and Black Sonic Ecologies: The Case of Sound System Cultures in Edinburgh

Aadita Chaudhury (PhD candidate, York University, CA and research assistant, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

The meeting of Black technoscientific knowledge traditions with Scottish history and its presence throughout its cultural lifeways and cityscapes speaks to a unique heritage of colonialism and exchange that is specific to the Scottish experience. While Scotland has its own history of various degrees of subjugation under the British colonial project, Scottish people have also partaken in empire as is sometimes described as »junior partners« in the imperial project through their own involvement in extraction of lands, resources, lives and knowledge systems.

In late 20th century and contemporary United Kingdom, reggae sound systems remain a palpable part of the ways Black sonic ecologies and knowledge systems propagate. The commingling of Scottish and Caribbean experiences, and the resultant technoscientific cultures are yet to be fully considered. This paper situates the role and persistent presence of Black knowledge systems in the Scottish context, with a specific attention to the sound system scene in the city of Edinburgh and surroundings.

Aadita Chaudhury is a PhD candidate in science and technology studies (STS) at York University, Canada. With a background spanning environmental studies, STS, political ecology, cultural studies and interdisciplinary arts practice, Aadita explores how scientific inquiry and the arts can configure nature as a site for embodied experiential knowledges, and future world-making. She is also a research assistant to the Sonic Street Technologies project at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Listening as a Form of Activism, Field Recordings as an Act of Archival Practice

Julianne Chua (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, DE)

MOTHER TONGUES is a countermapping video project that explores the issues of language, (post)migration, and diaspora by disrupting static images of liminal and interstitial sites in the city of Berlin with a cacophony of field recordings from İstanbul, where generations of Gastarbeiter*innen (»guest workers«) and newer waves of immigrants trace their last port of call. Teasing out notions of hapticity, ephemerality and transience through the specificity of analogue photographs created with a Kodak FunSaver disposable camera as a chosen medium, the images elucidate the sense of loneliness, anonymity, and alienation that immigrants sometimes face, reinforced by scenes of supermarkets, train platforms, and traffic lights that are mostly devoid of people.

Berlin’s diasporic population is much more diverse than its English-speaking communities, and this landscape is ever-shifting. Despite this fact, languages such as Turkish, Arabic, and Vietnamese are overheard on the streets, but unheard on »official« channels. How can we invoke collective acts of listening and participatory art to transpose notions of the diaspora and sustain transversal affinities? By disrupting spaces with silences and sounds from elsewhere, the work reflects upon the absence of multilingualism in Berlin’s public spaces and activates sonic borderlessness as a tool to reimagine space as (post)migrant utopias.

Julianne Chua is a Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist, writer, and researcher interested in transversal affinities across diasporas. She is a graduate student and student assistant at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her works have been published in Afterglobe, Kepulauan, Inheritance and The Posthumanist, presented at Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße and Universität der Künste, and performed at Tasarım Bakkalı, NYU Abu Dhabi, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. As part of Refuge Worldwide's Radio Mentorship Program, she hosts Mutfak, a show that dishes out diasporic and decolonial perspectives on food, family, and fictions peppered with interviews, field recordings, sound archives, and poetry.

Note: The previously listed speaker Maria Giaever Lopez has withdrawn from the festival.

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Supported by SHAPE+ which is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.