Politics of the Voice Documentation

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2024 (Gent, 27 – 31 March 2024), with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.

The voice emanates from within.

Here are seven artists who are not afraid of the sound of their own voices — whether embodied, sonic, visual, spoken, recited, conversed, unvoiced, silent.

They do not take their agency or freedom to express for granted.
They know these freedoms have been hard won.

This is the Politics of the Voice.

(Elaine Mitchener)

Curated by Elaine Mitchener. In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent).

X-Ray Hex Tet Reader

For the programme Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 5) // X-Ray Hex Tet (19 – 20 October 2024, Les Ateliers Claus Brussels) and the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent), we compiled a reader. Please mail me if you want me to send a copy.

CONTENT

1. Nathaniel Mackey, ‘All Day Music’. From Nathaniel Mackey, Double Trio, New York: New Directions (2021).
2. Gregg Bordowitz & Fred Moten, ‘Precedent’. Transcribed from Some Styles of Masculinity Book Launch with Gregg Bordowitz & Fred Moten (October 2, 2021). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udCjZGTEwkw&t=788s (13’08-18’17).
3. Stuart Hall, ‘Conjuncture’. Transcribed from Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life (2004). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY4Ve_r1PHU (media foundation transcription).
4. Nathaniel Mackey, ’14. VI. 78’. From: Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volume 1), Lexington : University of Kentucky (1986).
5. Excerpt from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press (1991).
6. James G. Spady, ‘Interview with Sylvia Robinson’. From James G. Spady, Charles G. Lee, H. Samy Alim, Street Conscious Rap, Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Umum/Loh Pub (1999).
7. Aurelia Martín-Casares and Marga G. Barranco, ‘The Musical Legacy of Black Africans in Spain: A Review of Our Sources’, Anthropological Notebooks 15, no. 2 (2009).
8. Anne Carson, ‘On the Total Collection’. From: Anne Carson, Short Talks, Brick Books (1992).
9. Excerpt from Crystabel Riley, ‘Skincare/Uncare’, Beauty Papers (online) (2018).
10. Abstract from Cristiana Costa da Rocha, ‘The Limits between Exploration and Slavery in the Carnauba Wax Cycle’, Belo Horizonte 77 (2020).
11. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’ (Trans. by Avital Ronell), Critical Inquiry 7 (1980).
12. Marie Prince, The history of Mary Prince: A West Indian slave. Related by herself (1831)

Reader compiled by X-Ray Hex Tet. edited by Stoffel Debuysere. Design by Ran de Vos (In Vitro). In collaboration with Les Ateliers Claus, Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In Vitro, with the support of VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) and Q-O2. 

Bodies of Sound

An edited version of the conversation I had with Trinh T. Minh-ha in the context of the Courtisane festival 2023 will be published in the amazing collection Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver press, November 2024), edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.

With contributions from:

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O’Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Susana de Sousa Dias

Welcome to Doc’s Kingdom!

SUSANA DE SOUSA DIAS is a filmmaker and artist from Portugal. Her films and installations explore the dialectics of history and memory, questioning established regimes of visibility with a focus on the archive. Using still photographs and archival imagery, her first works (2000-2017) deal with the memory of the dictatorship in Portugal. Through testimonies from political prisoners, and resulting from extensive research in the national archives, her work played an important role in the public denunciation of the violent repression and torture used by the regime. More recently, she directed Fordlandia Malaise, in 2019, and co-directed Viagem ao Sol, with Ansgar Schaefer, in 2021. She often collaborates with her brother António de Sousa Dias, composer and artist, in the creation of the soundtrack for her films. Her work has received numerous awards and has been presented worldwide.
In 2012, she created a female collective that directed Doclisboa for two editions, establishing new sections such as Cinema of Urgency and Passages (Documentary & Contemporary Art). She is a co-founder of the production company Kintop. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts-Video, and teaches at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon.
~
Doc’s Kingdom – Ways of Listening
International Seminar on Documentary Film
19-23 Nov 2024 | Odemira, Portugal
Registrations and more information here:

Doc’s Kingdom 2024: Odemira, 19-23 Nov.

Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 5) // X-Ray Hex Tet

Sat 19 October 2024 > Sun 20 October 2024, les Ateliers Claus Brussels

What could it mean to practice politics by performing music? How could musical improvisation – as a process of collectively searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them – reconfigure our sense of the world? How can we experience and understand music not simply as what presents itself in the context of sound-phenomena-organized-in-time-and-exchanged-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing – in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language?

These and other questions will be explored over two days through the practice of X- Ray Hex Tet – an ongoing collaboration between:

Billy Steiger – celeste and violin
Crystabel Riley – drums
Edward George – words and music
Pat Thomas – piano and electronics
Paul Abbott – drums and synthetic sounds
Seymour Wright – alto saxophone (actual and potential)

Six musicians of different backgrounds working at the margins of what is (to many) acceptable in terms of music, genre, technique, interpretation, history and ‘tradition’; a set of subjectivities, energies and philosophies who, in dialogue together, venture and probe the awkward wealth and friction of investigation, finding pleasure (and treasure) in searching for the hidden, secret, and mysterious at the edges of music and meaning.

They will release a recording through Reading Group (New York) in the near term.

Pat Thomas is a UK-based pianist who has been performing and recording in a stunning range of contexts. Active for over 30 years, he has collaborated with Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Rhys Chatham, Lol Coxhill, Wadada Leo Smith and many others, and is part of the groups اسم [Ism] and أحمد [Ahmed] and more. He studied classical piano but has always been interested in approaching music from a variety of different vantage points. Different traditions, from dub to improvisation and jungle, come together in the sound world of Pat Thomas. His research, both in his music and his occasional writing, is dedicated, among other things, to rethinking the history of jazz, in light of the underrecognized contribution of West African Islam.

Seymour Wright is a saxophonist from the UK who has released several solo albums and collaborated with groups such as أحمد [Ahmed], @xcrswx, GUO, XT and lll人. The various practices he has engaged in throughout his life – improvisational performances, writing about music, teaching – are all linked by his curiosity and desire to learn. He grew up the son of a concert organizer and spent much of his childhood immersed in music and other art forms, but developed his music practice as part of a weekly improvised music workshop led by AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost. From there, he also grew a dissertation that used the AMM collective’s practice as a case study to explore how people develop creative practice together, as a situated and collective form of learning.

Edward George is a London-based writer, broadcaster and photographer. A founding member of Black Audio Film Collective, he wrote and presented, among others, the seminal essay film Last Angel of History (1996), which helped pave the way for contemporary thinking around Afro-futurism. George was part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion and the electronic music project Hallucinator. His ongoing radio series The Strangeness of Dub and The Strangeness of Jazz intertwine a broad musical selection with different geographical musical histories, African/Afro-diasporic knowledge and critical theory from queer and black studies. His work includes Dub Housing, a project exploring how dub music articulates a different consciousness of people and place, time and geography, history and architecture, race and metropolis.

Paul Abbott is a London-based musician, drummer and writer. He explores music as ecology, in which the interaction of sounds, signs and the physical body allows real and imaginary music to grow. His work often focuses on creating practical and fictional structures to enable improvisation and experimental musical play. Recent and ongoing collaborations include: XT with Seymour Wright; RP Boo Trio with XT; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey; yPLO with Micheal Speers. Abbott recently finalized his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, entitled Playing no solo imagination: synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and creative writing. He is currently conducting research at the Royal Conservatory/Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He was also co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso, journal for music, politics and poetics.

Crystabel Riley toured Japan and Europe in the late 2000s with drums, electronics and make-up in the power-noise trio Maria and the Mirrors. This was the beginning of her interest in shapes and patterns on skins – both human and drum. An interest in dimensional patterns on (and of) different surfaces, aesthetic, biological and historical, has continued to develop by exploring the idea of ‘care and uncare’ of different skin surfaces. Crystabel has long collaborated with Sue Lynch, who welcomed her into the Horse Improvised Music Club and later played in the London Improvisers Orchestra. She is currently working, among others, on the multi-format duo project @xcrswx with Seymour Wright.

Billy Steiger has been causing a furore on the London improvisation scene for several years. This Irish violinist’s non-idiomatic approach can be experienced in projects such as Frîdd Newydd, a solo recording of his ‘magical-realist violin music’ accompanied by drawings and photographs of his trip to an imaginary village in Wales. As a visual artist and musician, his practice evolves as a kind of writing by ear. He is inspired by the work of Clarice Lispector, mainly her book Água Viva, which always seems to be in suspension between interior and exterior and impression and expression. His music resonates in some ways with her work, which engages less with the cerebral or knowable realm of words, than with the unknowable moment of experience. He has played with David Toop, Daniel Blumberg and O YAMA O, among others.

In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent). In collaboration with Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In vitro, with the support of VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) and Q-O2.

Entrance: €12

les ateliers claus
rue crickxstraat 15
1060 brussels