A Perfect Fit

 

Due to the current Corona crises, the upcoming Listening Sessions within SAVVY Contemporary’s UNTRAINING THE EAR project will be translated for radio and online channels. Three sound events will be broadcast on our 88,4 FM time in Berlin and 99.7 in Potsdam, as well as streamed online. 

These sessions over the radio are entitled LISTENING STATIONS: Listening Into Placelessness. The idea of placelessness comes from Lucy Lippard, and fuels our interest to imagine a two way communication over radio waves encouraging people to use their imagination when they listen, to actively get inspired by some form of instructions the artists give.  Listening Stations refers to a mode, a type of listening with our body as a station, irrespective of adjutant tools, a body which receives and processes sound. Rather placed than searching, rather stationed, we presume to have more attention to the unknown elements that every place has. We ask ourselves how we can grasp these elements, and is what we are now able to listen to rather anew than new to our ears.

Shanti Suki Osman will present A Perfect Fit,  the third piece in her loose trilogy of live listening and sound performances concerning privilege and bias (The Hearing Test) and microaggressions and rage (Chipping Away). Combining storytelling, pre-recorded sounds and intermittent instructions for the listeners, this extended piece for radio, shifts the focus to questions of balancing power from a marginalised perspective, problematising "one-size inclusion fits all" and calling more attention to voices in unwanted spaces – listening to contradictions in occasional discomfort. The two other pieces of this trilogy are: The Hearing Test presented at EXP(L)O(RE) (The English Theater Berlin, 2018), an interactive sound performance based on instructions asking the audience to scrutinize habits in their auditory perception and unravel what may lay behind our tendencies and tastes; and Chipping Away, a radio piece presented at I AM NOT A FORTUNE COOKIE, (ACUD, 2018) centering the dangerous normalisation of many forms of discrimination causing an endemic of insidious racist behaviour in apparent "safe spaces".

Shanti Suki Osmanis a Berlin-based artist and educator working with song, sound and radio, exploring the topics of identities, privilege, anti-racism and feminisms. She is research associate and teacher for Musicology at Humboldt University and doctoral candidate for Music Pedagogy at The Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg focusing on women* of colour, sound-making and space-making. In Late Nights In Squat Bars she writes and sings feminist electro-pop with Dafne Della Dafne, and curates festivals and group shows – including the sound art exhibition and event series Hearing Now (Berlin June 2018). She was co-director of Die Remise (2019), a critical race and historical school project in Berlin founded by Carmen Mörsch, which was part of the preliminary programme of 11th Berlin Biennale (2019-20).

Residencies, und song und sound performances 2017–2020 include: DISTRICT BERLIN Studio Grant 2017–2018; Hidden Stories (2016–2018); Sonic Cyberfeminisms Residency and Launch, (Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge 2018, London 2019); The Hearing Test (English Theater Berlin, 2018); Hidden Library Stories: Magret und Nasreen (sonntagsbureau, 2018); SenseUs (London College of Communication, CRiSAP, 2018); Chipping Away (I AM NOT A FORTUNE COOKIE, ACUD), which was featured in Radiophrenia 2019; An Ode to Usha (Songs We Taught Your Mother, ausland, 2018); My Radiophonic Spaces (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2018) Future Sounds (Akademie der Autodidakten, Ballhaus Naunynstr, 2019); Die Remise (2018–2019).

MARLO DE LARA’s artistic practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Working under the moniker “marlo eggplant”, her sound works are textural compositions which develop from microscopic tone landscapes into dense and expansive states of noise. Her works aim to blur the definitions of the (un)intentional and the myth of permanence. She received a PhD in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and an MA in Psychosocial Studies at the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex. She recently was at an Artist in Residence at the 2019 CalArts Summer Institute and a nominee for the 2019 Oram Awards PRS Foundation.