A listening session of Temporary Stored II, released on October 11th through Kenyan ambient artist KMRU’s label OFNOT. The project features music by KMRU himself along with contributions from Aho Ssan, Jessica Ekomane, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Bhavisha Panchia, calling specifically for African & African diaspora artists to reconcile and reimagine colonial sound archives.
After is an intimate venue with mighty speakers. After the listening, there will be an artist Q&A with Kamaru, Jessica Ekomane and Nyokabi Kariũki.
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Details: Wednesday, 13 November 2024
doors open 19h
music starts 20h (ca 60 minutes)
artist Q&A - Kamaru, Jessica Ekomane and Nyokabi Kariũki
drinks before and after
Location: After, Köpenicker Straße 187-188, U Schlesisches Tor (courtyard back left corner ground floor)
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Listen to the project here & from the press release:
"When KMRU accessed the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, it catalysed an auditory response in the form of the album Temporary Stored. The album listened back to listen forward – to reckon with the collective inheritance of colonial (sound) archives. Temporary Stored II serves as an artistic and curatorial extension of the original album, inviting other artists to lend their critical ear to museum archives holding recordings of African songs, traditions and practices. With KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Jessica Ekomane draw upon their listening experiences as global contemporaries navigating a world in flux – ecologically, economically, and politically. Each artist brings a selection of sonic fragments out of dormancy, channeling(in)audible traces into a contemporary cultural and political paradigm.
Temporary Stored II sensitively responds to historical archives whose sounds have been restored and made more accessible through digitalisation, despite still being the copyrighted property of European institutions. It develops an emergent language to engage with the vocal, rhythmic and syllabic intelligence rooted in these sonic repertoires, grounded in reimagination of sonic records as seeds for a sounding future. Listening back to these recordings is one way to recover the loss of listening traditions, orality and modes of transmission. In these sonic mediations, Lamin Fofana, KMRU, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariũki and Aho Ssan account for the archives with care and criticality.
Inscribed in this album are “black waveforms as rebellious enthusiasms”, which in the words of Katherine McKittrick “affirm, through cognitive schemas, modes of being human that refuse anti blackness while restructuring our existing system of knowledge.” The album asks us to listen to colonial pasts and imagine the sound of our epistemological futures. It is a sonic retort; a playback to history and its colonial processes of extraction and accumulation. Temporary Stored II is a reminder that the labour of listening back is a continuous process of reassessing what has been lost, captured and refused."
Listen & support the project here!
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