Soundings
Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the Souths
What do sounds and music mean to those who do not recognise their tradition, culture or worldview in the globally dominant Eurocentric artistic and intellectual sound art and music practices? Who derive their listening from other origins, other contexts, other myths, and other models than those common in Western modernity? Who pursue their own attitude to sound and music outside the Euro-American cultural and scientific establishment?
Over 5 days, their ways of listening, their aesthetic conditions, their knowledges, their goals and aspirations were voiced, heard and exchanged in open conversations, open musical forms, open discourses. Decolonisation thus understood not as the process of exonerating of cultural establishments, but as an opportunity to think, to listen, to sound and to learn from each other without having to place oneself within the sonic histories of Europe: discussions and listening situations that evolve outside and counter to currently hegemonic cultural spheres. We invited attentive listeners and sounders from around the globe!
Akademie der Künste Berlin Hanseatenweg
August 21-25, 2022
Steering Committee:
Oladele Ayorinde, Sandeep Bhagwati, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Murat Gürel, Sandipan Nath, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Bhavisha Panchia, Glaucia Peres da Silva, Deniza Popova
Partner
Akademie der Künste Berlin, inm / field notes berlin and Ultima Festival Oslo matralab Montréal and Sound Across Den Haag
Context and roles of the institutions
The Akademie der Künste and the inm - intiative neue musik berlin / field notes have been organizing conferences since 2019, with the Ultima Festival Oslo and the Sounds Now network joining in 2020. After an open space in 2019 and a first hybrid symposium in 2020, which were primarily led by the institutions, an advisory board was installed for the second edition of the symposium in 2021 to define the thematic priorities and format. At the Soundings gathering in August 2022, the power in the decision-making process shifts once again: content and planning decisions are the responsibility of the Steering Committee and the network that has grown up around it. AdK, inm / field notes, Ultima and Sounds Now Network now support the project as merely silent partners.
