Social Recordings presents: Listening Documentaries - About listening, sensing & receiving

How to interpret and perceive the world through listening? How to create openness to sense what we do not know and recognize forms of otherness without dominant mediation?

Can we develop a listening ethic and practice that performs more justice?

How can listening documentaries contribute to this search? And if we start from listening and emphasize the audible, what (new) role do we give to the visual?

Ernst Maréchal (Social Recordings) invites Miguel Buenrostro to present and talk together about their Listening Documentaries.

Listening Voices & Cosmoaudiciones
Ernst Maréchal, Miguel Buenrostro & many others - Film, Sound & Talk

Listening Voices #1: resonating diversity is a film that asks how we can create a world without masking: where loud and dominant voices do not drown out the quiet ones.

To research this question further, the film brings together two special events. Both events revolve around listening research and practice.

The first one is the Soundings gathering at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in August 2022. Soundings is conceived as a plurilogue with a focus on non-Western listening.

Ernst Maréchal participates and listens to numerous testimonies. On how identities are suppressed. About class and the dominant concept of culture. About the issues non-white artists face. About dealing with gatekeepers who often discriminate new voices. `

But also about how we should try to overcome opposites. That we can learn from everyone. That listening and sharing cultures holds the power of understanding. On how to use sound, music and rhythm to resist superior forces that make traditions disappear ...

Ernst Maréchal presents his project Social Recordings: he portrays eight people who express themselves with words and instruments. The sounds they create encompass many meanings and some of the challenges that the Soundings gathering aims to propagate.

All of these questions and experiences echoed in the portraits are carried into a second event in the film: the September 2022 Listening Academy at IKLECTIK, a venue for sound art in London. Some of the London participants listen to the recordings and become part of the project through their captioned responses, creating a new non-linear plurilogue between all involved.

Ernst Maréchal is an audiovisual artist, researcher, performer and songwriter. With the Social Recordings project, he co-creates from a subjective and engaged point of view, searching for ways in which diverse - sometimes opposite - voices can resonate together. This is also the subject of his PhD in the Arts at RITCS/ VUB.

Cosmoaudiciones traces the relationship between the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv (which collects more than 150 000 sound recordings including many of an ethnomusicological nature) and the musical worlds that traveled in and out of the Atlantic, into the Americas. This investigation departs from what linguist Carlos Lenkersdorf calls ‘Cosmoaudición’. If our worldview (Cosmovision) is the way we perceive and interpret the world through a vision, then our ‘Cosmoaudición’ would be the way we perceive and interpret the world through the act of listening.

Cosmoaudición therefore, implies a way of experiencing the world from a position of openness, a way to create – through shared horizons- new connections. This investigation is motivated by listening to broader worlds of meaning, which have been preserved statically, enclosed in sound archives of ethnographic collections.

In our engagement with the archive, we have acknowledged the violence, the power structures, the politics of archiving and the supremacy that is embedded in ethnographic collections. In parallel we have listened to journeys, exchanges and trajectories of music by situating our practice within a listening ethic.

With Berlin-based musicians from the diasporas we listen to archival recordings - curated by Miguel Buenrostro - and respond to them with musical improvisation. Musical temporalities that precede notions of linear time, creating possibilities of restitution beyond the return of material heritage. Listening-Sensing-Receiving music and re-embodying rhythm and memory. Expanding the archive beyond the institution.

13:00 -16:30
Luister- en visiecel, RITCS, Antoine Dansaertstraat 70, 1000
Language: English

Kanga Munoko Yoka (Shut up and listen) & Mutu-Mutu
Miguel Buenrostro,
Pisko Crane, Aicha Mena Kanieba & many others
Film & Talk

1. Kanga Munoko Yoka (Shut up and listen) is a series of listening sessions filmed during the Kinzonzi exhibition program in Kinshasa. The film accompanies the founders of the explosive music collective Full Miziki in their artistic process. From the creation of musical instruments and ‘eco’ fashion, to intimate rehearsals. and unexpected musical performances in the National Museum of the DRC.

The film proposes a ‘listening positionality’ as a way of entering in relation with the radical diversity of musical worlds in Kinshasa. Moving beyond Western representations of otherness and categories of exotic ‘world music’, shifting towards artistic freedom and its interaction with musical embodiment and environmental action.

2. Mutu - Mutu is the Lingala word for Human - Human, a word that refers to locals in different parts of Congo. While the word Mundele refers to the white foreigner, the film explores the position of the filmmaker, as a non-white subject, non- local in Kinshasa. The artist reflects on his own subjective in -betweenness.

The film takes us around the changing waters of the Congo river, while sounding the music of different musicians, comedians, and street entertainers that earn a living performing on site. The film proposes a way of listening to the river through the music played along the rocks and clarifies the reflections between Congolese, Latin American and Caribbean musical flows.

Miguel Buenrostro is a visual artist from Tijuana (Mexico) and is based in Berlin (Germany). His work reflects on the condition of the border as a site of knowledge production and interconnection. Working with listening practices, cinematic and performative gestures in public space.

19:00- 21:00
CINEMA RITCS, A. Dansaertstraat 70, 1000 Brussel
Language: English. Taal: Engels