Sonic Interventions

In the last episode of season 5, Jan Dammel is in conversation with musician and sound artist Elsa M’Bala. They talk about Cameroonian anti-colonial organisers in Berlin during the interwar period, such as Victor Bell, and what it means for Elsa to work with sound archives in European universities and museums. Learn more about her ongoing project Kribi Archives, which makes ethnographic recordings of Cameroonian music accessible in Kribi, and her general investment in creating listening spaces.

Artist and researcher Rehema Chachage is in conversation with Jan Dammel about mixed-media installations in Johannesburg, Leipzig and Stade. They discuss Rehema’s long-term engagement with her matriline, how songs can serve as “unlikely witnesses to history”, and how the marigold speaks to both colonial uprooting of plants to Tanzania and intergenerational transmissions.

Hörspielmacher:in Joel Vogel und Musiker Vincent Bababoutilabo sprechen über gemeinsame Projekte wie ihren dekolonialen Hörspaziergang zurückERZÄHLT (2020), der Akte des Widerstands von 106 Personen aus den damaligen ‚deutschen Kolonien‘, die im Sommer 1896 im Berliner Treptower Park arbeiteten und lebten, ins Zentrum stellt. Sie berichten von ihrem Umgang mit dem (kolonialen) Archiv, von der Möglichkeit mit Sound gewaltvolle Geschichte anders zu erzählen und davon, wie ihr Audiowalk seit fünf Jahren Menschen versammelt.

Season 5, curated by Jan Dammel, focuses on artistic interventions in Germany that deal with colonialism and its ongoing legacies. This first episode features multi-disciplinary artist Percy Nii Nortey and curator Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, who collaborated on the group exhibition “Colonial Ghosts – Resistant Spirits” in Berlin’s St. Nicholas Church. Learn more about Nortey’s dialogue with, and celebration of, the working class in Ghana and how bold fabric and sonic artworks, also by Theresa Weber, challenge and transform post/colonial (church) spaces.