Imagine you are in a museum: What do you hear?
Bhavisha Panchia (Nothing to Commit Records)
Imagine you’re in a museum. What do you hear? is an audio collage that weaves together disparate musical tracks, extracts of interviews, speeches and audio notes as listening provocations that speak to the affective resonances of dislocation and dispossession of land, people and (im)material culture.
Can we listen to systems of colonial modernity and its extractive and accumulative logics? The museum speaks with a voice filled with the grain of a quiet authority; so do the institutions that care for fragile archives. How can we listen to the acoustic impossibilities of objects housed in these institutions? Whose voices are we listening to as we move through a museum? Whose voice do we hear when we encounter these objects and archives?
Final mix: 344 Studios, Sudhir Misra
Listen here
References:
Alain Resnais & Chris Marker – Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), 1953
Lamin Fofana, Cosmic Injuries, 2019
Dahomey: Danse Devant le fetiche. Collector Phillipe Stern, Exposition coloniale de Paris, 1931 [174 disques]Recording date : May 1, 1931 – Nov. 30, 1931, © National Library of France
Chino Amobi/ NKISI EDIT, Paradiso, 2017
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry, Super Predator, 2020
Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83. London: Jacaranda Books,2016
Healer Oran, Pine and Willow, 2020
Simon Gush, A Button without a Hole, 2020 (https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/show/sounding-the-land/)
L’Union de l’Afrique du sud : Exposition coloniale internationale, Paris 1931. Publisher: L. Danel (Lille), Exposition coloniale,1931. (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6222408j)
Lamin Fofana, Sono, 2019
Tiago Correia-Paulo, Sound of Masks OST, O Som das Máscaras, 2018.
The Sound of Masks (2018). Directé by Sara de Gouveia (http://www.thesoundofmasks.com/)
Dane Belany, Complexium – After Aimé Césaire, 1975
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and researcher of visual and audio culture based in Johannesburg. Her work engages with artistic and cultural practices under shifting global conditions, focusing on anti/postcolonial discourses, imperial histories and networks of production and circulation of (digital) media. A significant part of her practice centres on auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, particularly with respect to the social and ideological significance of sound and music in contemporary culture.
