A collaboration between ifa Gallery Berlin and Manifesta 2020.
12.09.2020, 14.00- 21.00
Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille
A programme of encounters, readings, listenings, performances and interventions on, through and across the questions of restitution and repair through art. It combines the sonic and the poetic, movement and speculation, thought and debate by criss-crossing contemporary geopolitical divisions that need to be unsettled. The invited artists, thinkers, poets, dancers and scholars leave traces throughout Marseille and beyond, online and offline, provoking us to think about knowledge production, movement and (im)possible reparation.
Adapting to the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, this programme consists of one day of encounters at the Vielle Charité on September 12th and continues both off- and online. Over the course of M13, this series of iterations presents records, and gathers traces of events, which will be made accessible in a variety of formats to future audiences on untietotie.org.
With: Matthieu Abonnenc, Nora Al-Badri, Memory Biwa, Barbara Cassin, Badr El Hammami, Bhavisha Panchia, Dorothée Munyaneza, Estelle N’Tsende, Xavier Rey, Assia Zouane, et al.
Conceived and curated by Nikola Hartl, Alya Sebti, and Jonas Tinius
Programme:
14.00
ITERATION # LISTENING: Imagine you are in a museum: What do you hear? By Bhavisha Panchia (Nothing to Commit Records), Soundpiece
Listen here.
Imagine you’re in a museum. What do you hear? is an audio collage that weaves together disparate musical tracks, extracts of interviews, speeches and audio notes as listening provocations that speak to the affective resonances of dislocation and dispossession of land, people and (im)material culture.
Can we listen to systems of colonial modernity and its extractive and accumulative logics? The museum speaks with a voice filled with the grain of a quiet authority; so do the institutions that care for fragile archives. How can we listen to the acoustic impossibilities of objects housed in these institutions? Whose voices are we listening to as we move through a museum? Whose voice do we hear when we encounter these objects and archives?
Final mix: 344 Studios, Sudhir Misra
References:
Alain Resnais & Chris Marker – Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), 1953
Lamin Fofana, Cosmic Injuries, 2019
Dahomey: Danse Devant le fetiche. Collector Phillipe Stern, Exposition coloniale de Paris, 1931 [174 disques]Recording date : May 1, 1931 – Nov. 30, 1931 © National Library of France
Chino Amobi/ NKISI EDIT, Paradiso, 2017
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry, Super Predator, 2020
Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83. London: Jacaranda Books, 2016
Healer Oran, Pine and Willow, 2020
Simon Gush, A Button without a Hole, 2020 (https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/show/sounding-the-land/)
L’Union de l’Afrique du sud : Exposition coloniale internationale, Paris 1931. Publisher: L. Danel
(Lille), Exposition coloniale,1931. (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6222408j)
Lamin Fofana, Sono, 2019
Tiago Correia-Paulo, Sound of Masks OST, O Som das Máscaras, 2018.
The Sound of Masks (2018). Directé by Sara de Gouveia – (http://www.thesoundofmasks.com/)
Dane Belany, Complexium – After Aimé Césaire, 1975
14.30
Intro by Jonas Tinius
15.00
ITERATION # TRACING & RETURNING With Nora Al-Badri and Badr El Hammami, Presentations + Q&A
Artists Nora Al-Badri and Badr El Hammami trace the agency of objects, sounds, and materials. They present their works on speculative archaeology and technoheritage, circulation and return, asking how objects can be activated across analogue and digital technologies to bypass national and state narratives on heritage and memory.
*Nora Al-Badri’s project „Neuronal Ancestral Sculptures Series” (images) and „Babylonian Vision“ (videos) was realised within the Artist-in-residence program of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)“.
16.00
ITERATION # PROPOSITIONS By and with Xavier Rey (director of the Museums of Marseille), Barbara Cassin (philosopher and curator), Assia Zouane & Estelle N’Tsendé (Les Lunettes Décoloniales), Dorothée Munyaneza (choreographer and artist), Inputs and Talk with Q&A
Following the sonic and artistic iterations, this roundtable iteration comprises artistic, curatorial, poetic, acoustic, activist, and scholarly propositions unfolding around key concepts in the discussion of restitution, including ‘repair’, ‘the body’, ‘objects’, ‘museums’, ‘relations’, ‘rehabilitation’ and highlights the tensions, frictions, ruptures, and possibilities of grappling with fractured histories, object agency, and reparation.
With a proposition by Assia Zouane and Estelle N’Tsendé (Les Lunettes décoloniales), followed by a discussion between the directeur of the Marseille museums Xavier Ray & philosopher Barbara Cassin, and a roundtable including choreographer and artist Dorothée Munyaneza, moderated by anthropologist Jonas Tinius.
17.30
ITERATION # LISTENING: SunBorn Lullabies and Battle Cries By Memory Biwa (co-produced with Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri), Audiowork
Listen here.
Historian Memory Biwa combines memory, the sonic, and archival theory. Her piece, which is conceived as an ‘aural procession’, of a lullaby sung at dawn, battle cries, chants, ululations, bow-playing, and landscapes trace narratives of colonial violence and re-enactments of resistance in Namibia. These traces are drawn from aural, sartorial and performative practices which inform notions of subjectivity and the re-centering of alternative epistemologies and imaginaries.
The piece was co-produced with Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri.
The sound recordings are of:
Elder Jarimbovandu Alex Kaputu (Ceremonial Chief Priest of the Holy Fire, and Lieutenant General of the Red Flag), Ovaherero and Nama delegation (including Genocide Committees), Human remains viewing/ceremony at Charite University Hospital, Berlin, September 2011, recording by Larissa Foerster
Elders Lena Venter, and Fritz //Hamaseb, Okahandja, central Namibia,1954, Ernst and Ruth Dammann Sound Collection, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel.
Swimming pool waterfall at Spa, Klein-Windhoek (a place of early settlement near hot springs), Windhoek, August 2020, recording by Memory Biwa
18.00
ITERATION # IMAGING [imagine]: Sector IX B, Sleeping Sickness Prophylaxis (FRA 2015) With Mathieu Abonnenc, Screening and discussion
Filmmaker, artist & curator Mathieu Abonnenc will be presenting and discussing fragments of his film Sector IX B, Sleeping Sickness Prophylaxis (FRA 2015, HD Video, colour / sound, 42 min) with Alya Sebti (curatrice & M13 Artistic Team).
19.00 APERO
Following:
ITERATION # MOVING [déplacement], Performance(s) MAAOA
Date and time to be announced
Artist and choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza moves across the traces and spaces of the colonial past and postcolonial present related to restitution, objecthood and aspects of memory and the body in a performative tour through the ethnographic collections of the musée d’arts africains, océaniens et amérindiens (MAAOA).
