Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention
RECORD PRE-LAUNCh 23.06.2023 19:30
WITH Louis Chude-Sokei, Jan St. Werner, Hani Mojtahedy, Gascia Ouzounian, Michael Akstaller and Yara Mekawei
Language The event takes place in English
FREE ENTRy Donations welcome
ACCESS Our space is accessible by wheelchair
We cordially invite you to join us in listening to ruins. Over two years, an international group of artists, thinkers, musicians, and scholars turned the former Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds into an experiment in listening. The goal was to listen to history and open new artistic perspectives through performative perception, field recordings and sound walks, installations, and written texts.
A famous field recordist once said, “events haunt spaces.” Another way of saying this is that history contaminates place, hence the focus here on spaces that have been impacted if not defined by historical trauma. Such spaces tend to be overdetermined by their histories. That field recordist’s insight also reminds us that listeners are already contaminated by the histories, associations, and meanings of a particular location, and so the chosen spaces are not assumed to be neutral. In encouraging history to bleed into present listening we allow space to speak.
This group includes writer/scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, artist/musician Jan St. Werner, singer/activist Hani Mojtahedy, scholar/violinist Gascia Ouzounian, artists MendiandKeith Obadike, Michael Akstaller and Yara Mekawei. At SAVVY Contemporary, members of the group will discuss their research and experiences and will premiere recordings and performances generated from the Nuremberg experiment.
support The project is being supported by Kulturstiftung des Bundes and a SAVVY record of this experiment is forthcoming in summer.
Photo Jan St. Werner