Sonic Migrations and Archival Futures: Listening Session and Conversation

Programme
The event opens with a listening session of student works developed in meLê Yamomo’s recent seminar “Conjuring Voices” at the musicology department of the Freie Universität Berlin. Broadcast on student radio couchFM, these works engage with diverse archival recordings from prisoners-of-war camps in Königsbrück (1916) and Gießen (1917) to Mapuche chant from Chile and material from the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. Along with articulations of the body as archive and practices of hip-hop sampling, these projects consider how memory, corporeality and time materialise and resonate.

Continuing the reworking of traces through speculative listening, interference, narration, and re-composition, Aimee Rabah, clarinettist and student at the Barenboim-Said academy will present a piece composed by Arda Bayram. This was developed from their engagement, together with Alia Mossallam, with archival audio material recorded in Palestine.

The second half of the evening is a conversation between meLê yamomo and Alia Mossallam. Both engage critically with Berlin's sonic archives and refuse the singularity of imperial logics that persist within archival and listening practices. The discussion will centre on their diverse strategies for revisiting, returning and mediating the captured voices and sounds from the Berlin sonic archives and how this resonates with their wider fields of work.

Context
This event is part of a series of student-led events at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft this semester, including a screening of Protest Under Pressure and the upcoming Offener Hörsaal event.