Every Time
a Ear di Soun

Every Time a Ear di Soun, a documenta 14 Radio Program, is being presented on February 23, 2017 in Berlin. Deutschlandradio Kultur and documenta 14 cordially invite you to join them for the event in the domed hall of SAVVY Contemporary. The Artistic Director of documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, artists Angela Melitopoulos and Emeka Ogboh, and curators Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Hila Peleg offer insights into the preparations for documenta 14 and talk about the ideas behind the radio program. The evening will be accompanied by musical interventions by Sonic Shadow aka Satch Hoyt with Earl Harvin and Dirk Leyers, as well as a DJ set by Lamin Fofana.

The event will be recorded and broadcast that same evening at 11:05 pm in conjunction with Deutschlandradio Kultur’s cultural magazine Fazit.

Every Time a Ear di Soun presents radio as both art and a medium for art. Eight radio stations in Greece, South Africa, Columbia, Lebanon, Brazil, Indonesia, the USA, and Germany will broadcast sonic art pieces for the documenta 14 Radio Program for three weeks each throughout the exhibition. In addition to their regular programs, the radio stations broadcast several hours of works produced specifically for documenta 14, recently rediscovered archive materials, and recordings of the Public Programs of documenta 14.

The transition and interconnection between vocal utterances, different modes of speech, sounds, and music as extending into performative practices are explored by the Radio Program of documenta 14, as is the embodied experience of such acoustical phenomena within psychic and physical space. Sound is fundamental to societies in which not only visual culture but also orally transmitted, acoustic knowledge plays a major role. Sonority functions beyond visual and written logic. In a manner transcending words, histories become audible and physically palpable and are passed from one generation to the next.

Acoustical practices are fundamentally participatory, implying the ability to share something, communicate with others, and create spaces for such exchange. Every Time a Ear di Soun explores the possibility of understanding oral traditions and acoustic phenomena as forms of knowledge exchange, while reflecting on how sound can create synchronicity between bodies, places, spaces, and histories.

The participating German radio station is an entirely new station, SAVVY Radio. Numerous artists have been invited to create a twenty-four-hour radio program for a period of three weeks, which will also be on view as a live performance at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. Together with Professor Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch, students of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar plan to create an archive on-site, which brings together scholarship and artistic research on historical and contemporary radio art and radiophony.