Sunborn Lullabies and Battle Cries

In the framework of  DESACTA. COUNTER-SPELLS TO UNRAVEL 140 YEARS OF THE BERLIN CONFERENCE, Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri invoke sonic counter-spells on our SAVVYZΛΛR radiowaves: 

SunBorn Lullabies and Battle Cries, 2020 (20:16 min)

The audio work is a cacophonic procession of chants: praises, battle songs, lullabies and bow-playing made by ritual facilitators, and delegates in Berlin in September 2011, and archival sound recordings of a storyteller and bow-player from Okahandja, central Namibia. The chants re-enact a historical watershed of the return(s) of ancestral remains from the place that they were kept for over a century after despoliation, and in the aftermath of the Berlin-Kongo Conference. The aural poetic formulations made in Berlin (and Okahandja) conjure a corporeal and spiritual passage across time-space, overlapping genealogies, and geographies of memory, to forge a rupture in the present. A place from where we can enact an embodied reversal of death-worlds, echoed in the words of Joan Dayan, "those who live are reclaimed by the ancestors who do not die".

SunBorn Lullabies and Battle Cries was first commissioned for Manifesta 13, Recontres: Tracing Fractures – Across Listening, Movement, Restitution and Repair, Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille, France, 2020 
 

Dreamwav (Nyaminyami Tidalectics), 2024 (7:40 min)

In the dream there are two rivers. One visible and the other, only heard as an echo of running water. The underground river embodies a water flow across meridians below the earth. The underground river is a passageway, interconnected to and affecting multiple sites. The meridians have a contrapuntal force pulsating towards and away from a centre. The Zambesian River geography which spans several southern African countries is one such overlapping site, with its epicentre at Kariba. These are places where the Wise Ones who lived near the Kariba gorge vanished, setting in motion a series of cataclysmic events, and fragmented cosmologies after the construction of Kariba dam (Credo Mutwa).

The audio track draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s tidal cosmologies or "tidalectics", which traces the dialectics between natural and human disasters, and the dislocation of life-ways on islands, interconnected mountain tips submerged by the oceans and rivers. Along with Credo Mutwa, we listen to the disappeared presences carved into the meridians of the underground Zambesi. In this rendition, the dystopian future has already happened, and we are waking up to its latest rehearsal in July 2024, the entry chapter of Octavia Butler’s, Parable of the Sower. The track is experienced as an ancestral multidimensional space, where what is imagined takes place in real time. It is a meditation on water bodies as the first technology, as carriers of memory, of totems, rituals, and life-worlds. It summons the multitude of voices, water, underground places, the vestiges of hydropolitics, and ecological dissonance, pushing us to enter into relations with a new wave.

Dreamwav (Nyaminyami Tidalectics) was commissioned for Memories of the Unbridled River, LOCA/LIAF, Lofoten International Art Festival, Lofoten, Norway, 20 September – 20 October 2024. With a premier radio broadcast on ‘Water No Get Enemy – a day long broadcast on Pan African Space Station’, Chimurenga, 15 October 2024, part of the symposium at the Tate Modern, Waterways: Arteries, Rhythm and Kinship.

Dzimu/dzangara/dzimu, 2021 (30:26 min)

Is a mashup of radio broadcasts, readings, and recordings made between Dakar, Durban, Berlin, and played over a multiple-channel acousmonium installation at the Audible Edge Festival of Sound, 6-18 April 2021, Perth, Australia. Dzimu/dzangara/dzimu was commissioned for the Audible Edge Festival, 2021.

Audio work by Pungwe Listening (Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri)