Quiet (As) Intervention.
Sonic Subtlety & Black Feminist Possibility

In this session, we will explore how Black Feminist engagements with sonic realms defy and re-define the notion of artistic intervention. Which possibilities are created by an attention towards quiet and subtle sounds in arts and academia? How can multidimensional and multisensorial approaches work towards decolonizing our senses and selves?

Romi Ron Morrison will present the current creative project The Future Conditional. Inspired by Tina Campt’s evocation of Black Feminist futurity as a conditional practice, Morrison creates a series of networked sound installations using interactive textiles and Black diasporic pattern making. The artist and researcher will be in conversation and interaction with artist-scholars Dr. Layla Zami and Jumoke Adeyanju. The evening will also include performative poetic interventions, a breeze of live-music, and a musical Ausklang: a playlist curated by Morrison, inviting the audience to engage with Black sonic worlds.

ROMI MORRISON is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work investigates the personal, political, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world that reduces land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Romi has exhibited work internationally at such venues as Transmediale (Berlin), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They are currently finishing their PhD in Media Arts + Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.  

Layla Zami is an innovative academic and artist. Her research, teaching, and creative work orbits around the nexus of cultural memory, corporeality, performance, diaspora, and spacetime. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in performance studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft (SFB1512 Intervening Arts) and Adj. Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. As an Interdisciplinary Resident Artist with Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Layla Zami creates and performs music, sounds, spoken words and physical theater. Together, they performed and curated internationally at venues/events such as Volksbühne, HAU, Abrons Arts Center, Dixon Place, Delhi International Queer Theater & Film Festival, and were keynote performers for the Black German Heritage & Research Association. Zami is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory (transcript Verlag, 2020).

Jumoke Adeyanju aka mokeyanju is a multilingual author, dancer, vinyl selector and aspiring sound artist. She is the founder of The Poetry Meets Series, and hosts her own radio show Sauti ya àkókò on Refuge Worldwide. Her multidimensional sound, poetry (in English, German, Kiswahili and Yorùbá) and movement art has been commissioned by Arthouse Foundation Lagos, AAF Lagos, CUNY NYC, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Deutschlandfunk Kultur & PUNGWE collective amongst others. As an allround-artist, Jumoke’s approach touches on topics like diaspora nostalgia, memory, spiritual liminal spaces, sonic tonalities, and how various elements of expressive art forms interrelate and incorporate the potential to (re-)create moments of reviving other or displaced selves.