:: SOUND :: :: GENDER :: :: FEMINISM :: :: ACTIVISM :: SGFA 2016 White Noise 10th, 11th & 12th November 2016 Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) London College of Communication University of the Arts London
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SOUND::GENDER::FEMINISM::ACTIVISM2016 White Noise At SGFA::2016 we will seek to listen together to the complex interplay between the auditory and social protocols of White Noise. Working out from white noise’s original sonic conception of a random frequency, broad-based signal that seemingly masks everything else, white noise is, increasingly, all around us. As Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman explains, white noise has become a “sonic protocol,” a socio-cultural norm transmitted as an often sub-audible yet ubiquitous frequency, establishing and maintaining perceptual limits of what and who can be heard. As in previous years, SGFA::2016 will feature a mixture of live performance, audio and video work and scholarly papers from presenters including: Annie Goh, Anuka Ramischwili-Schafer; Dan Scott; Gabriella Beckhurst; Gilles Aubry; INVASORIX; Marika Pratley, Hana Aoake, PiupiuMaya Turei, Virginia Kennard & Joanne Francey; Miriam Schickler; Natasha Lall; Nicola Woodham; Paul Tourle; Poulomi Desai; Rebecca Bruton; Rommi Smith in collaboration with Jenni Molloy & Juliet Ellis; Seda Ergül and Tuna Erdem (Istanbul Queer Art Collective); Shanti Suki Osman; Side Room & Barby Asante, Still Waiting Discussion Group and Syma Tariq. We are delighted to announce that our keynote presenters are Christine Eyene, Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire and Professor Vron Ware, Kingston University Chair of Sociology and Gender.
SGFA is led by Cathy Lane, Holly Ingleton and Angus Carlyle, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
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About: Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism
SGFA began in 2012 as a research event at London College of Communication (LCC), led by Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle, Holly Ingleton, Irene Noy and Iris Garrelfs. SGFA2012 took place just after ‘Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic’ events and symposium at Tate Modern in May 2012 - a collaboration between CRiSAP and Electra that expanded apon the work and concerns of the Her Noise archive, which is housed at LCC. Our aim was to continue and expand upon dialogues and discourses related to feminism and sound, and to contribute to a growing network of researchers and practitioners who are contributing to the development of the field of feminist sound studies. In 2014 SGFA grew to become a two day conference and workshop at LCC convened by Cathy Lane, Holly Ingleton and Angus Carlyle welcoming contributors and guests from all over the world to explore the questions What, in the historical present, might constitute an activist life in sound? And now, in 2016, we look forward to continuing the dialogues and expanding the network, exploring the theme of ‘White Noise’, launching the SGFA Zine and sharing the proceedings further afield in a live online stream.
Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP)
CRiSAP is a research centre of the University of the Arts London dedicated to the exploration of the rich complexities of sound as an artistic practice, comprising of sound arts teaching and research staff and students at London College of Communication. Our main aim is to extend the development of the emerging disciplinary field of sound arts and to encourage the broadening and deepening of the discursive context in which sound arts is practised. Founded in 2005, over the past decade CRiSAP has become the leading international research centre in sound arts practice. Led by co-directors Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, CRiSAP has produced publications, symposia, conferences, talks and exhibitions that have developed the emerging disciplinary field of sound 4
arts. CRiSAP members, each with their own international reputation as artists and researchers, have written notable publications, performed and exhibited internationally at renowned institutions and presented research papers at conferences worldwide.The centre supports a substantial cohort of PhD students and has welcomed numerous Research Fellows and Visiting Researchers over the last 10 years. CRiSAP is closely related to the BA (Hons) Sound Arts and Design and MA Sound Arts courses at LCC. www.crisap.org
Her Noise
Her Noise was initiated by Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset in 2001 with an ambition to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and to create a lasting resource in this area through building up an archive. In 2005, Lina and Anne co-curated Her Noise, an exhibition building on their research. The Her Noise Archive was donated to CRiSAP and now finds its permanent home in the University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections, at London College of Communication following a period of cataloguing by researcher Holly Ingleton, in collaboration with Cathy Lane (CRiSAP) and Irene Revell (Electra). www.hernoise.org
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Contents:
Introduction
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Travel and Local Information
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Schedule
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Keynotes
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Ring Di Alarm Workshop
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Still Waiting Discussion Group
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Session One
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Session Two
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Session Three
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Session Four
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Session Five
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Bios
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Travel and Local Information Location The conference is held at London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB.
Travel The College is based on a single site, with good public transport links by bus, train or underground. Both the Bakerloo and Northern lines stop at Elephant & Castle undreground station. The College is opposite the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre on the same side of the road as the Metropolitan Tabernacle, just a few minutes walk. A huge number of buses stop at a number of bus stops around the roundabout. Use the Transport for London website for planning your bus and underground routes: https://tfl.gov.uk The Elephant & Castle overground station is connected by Thameslink trains from Blackfriars Station, just 5 or so minutes walk away from 7
LCC. Use the National Rail website for overground train routes: www.nationalrail.co.uk
Accomodation Jamyang Buddhist Centre £30 per night including breakfast. Four unique guest rooms - all old Police Holding Cells! The Old Courthouse, 43 Renfrew Rd, London SE11 4NA (10 minute walk) www.jamyang.co.uk Air B&B The usual range options and £ for hostels, houses & apartments. www.airbnb.co.uk The Bridge Hotel Around £75 per night (*mention the conference when booking for a 15% discount) 30 Borough Road, London, SE1 0AJ (10 minute walk) www.thebridgehotel.net Ibis Styles - Southwark Rose Around £140 per night 43-47 Southwalk Bridge Road, London, SE1 9HH (20 minute walk) www.ibis.com
Cafes & Restaurants Lunch will be provided at the conference by vegetarian caterer Leon Lewis, tea and coffee will also be provided throughout the event. We can also recommend the following local restaurants and cafes:
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Jamyang Buddhist Centre Vegetarian cafe with vegan and gluten free options. The Old Courthouse, 43 Renfrew Rd, London SE11 4NA (10 minute walk) Monday - Friday 10am - 4pm The Artworks Elephant Shipping container, pop-up and start-ups hub, with a range of ‘global street food’ restaurants and cafes. Artworks, Elephant Rd, London SE17 1AY (5 minute walk) Opening times vary, ranging from 8am - 12am Mercato Metropolitano An Italian market specialising in small and local producers - with a range of cafes, restaurants, bars and produce sellers. 42 Newington Causeway London SE1 6DR (5 minute walk) Tuesday to Sunday 11am-11pm Mamuśka Authentic Polish restaurant and bar. 16 Elephant and Castle, London, SE1 6TH (5 minute walk) Monday - Sunday 9am - 11pm/12am La Bodeguita Latin American restaurant and bar. Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, London SE1 6TE (5 minute walk) Monday - Sunday 12pm - 11pm / 3am / 4am Tai Tip Mein Chinese restaurant noodle bar. 15, Elephant And Castle Shopping Centre, London SE1 6TE (5 minute walk) Monday - Sunday 11.30am - 11pm
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Schedule: Thursday 10th November 14.00 - 17.00 Ring Di Alarm Workshop (For delegates, booked in advance)
Friday 11th November 10.00 – 10.20
Registration
10.20 – 10.30
SGFA Welcome: Professor Cathy Lane, Professor Angus Carlyle and Dr Holly Ingleton
10.30 – 10.40
Still Waiting Discussion Group
10.40 – 11.55 Session 1: 10.40 – 11.00 Gabriella Beckhurst 11.00 – 11.10 Anuka Ramischwili-Schafer 11.10 – 11.30 Paul Tourle 11.30 – 11.55 Q&A 11.55 - 12.00
Short Break
12.00 – 13.20 Session 2: 12.00 – 12.20 Annie Goh 12.20 – 12.40 Syma Tariq 12.40 – 13.00 Miriam Schickler 13.00 – 13.20 Q&A 13.20 – 14.30
Lunch
14.30 – 16.10 Session 3: 14.30 – 14.50 Rommi Smith, in collaboration with Jenni Molloy & Juliet Ellis 14.50 – 15.10 Gilles Aubry
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15.10 - 15.30 Shanti Suki Osman 15.30 – 15.50 INVASORIX 15.50 – 16.10 Q&A Break
16.45 – 18.00
Key Note: Christine Eyene
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16.10 – 16.45
Saturday 12th November 10.00 – 10.30
Registration
10.30 – 11.45
Key Note: Vron Ware
11.45 - 11.50
Short Break
11.50 – 13.20 Session 4: 11.50 – 12.10 Marika Pratley, Hana Aoake, Piupiu-Maya Turei, Virginia Kennard & Joanne Francey 12.10 – 12.30 Side Room and Barby Asante 12.30 – 12.50 Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül (Istanbul Queer Art Collective) 12.50 – 13.00 Poulomi Desai 13.00 – 13.20 Q&A 13.20 – 14.20
Lunch
14.20 – 15.40 Session 5: 14.20 –14.30 Nicola Woodham 14.30 – 14.50 Dan Scott 14.50 – 15.10 Rebecca Bruton 15.10 – 15.20 Natasha Lall 15.20 – 15.40 Q&A 15.40 – 16.00
Break
16.00 – 17.00
Plenary with Professor Cathy Lane, Professor Angus Carlyle and Dr Holly Ingleton, and feedback from international participants who followed the remote stream.
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Keynote Speakers: We are delighted to welcome our keynote presenters, Christine Eyene, Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire and Professor Vron Ware, Kingston University Chair of Sociology and Gender.
Christine Eyene Coming at it from a black perspective: curatorial attempt on the sounds we make This lecture draws from Christine Eyene’s curatorial practice and its focus on African and Diaspora women artists. It will take as point of departure Where We’re At! Other Voices on Gender (Bozar, Brussels, 2014), an exhibition that broached historical, socio-political and cultural contexts to address issues such as the (mis)representation of nonWestern bodies in mainstream visual culture, and present counternarratives by culturally diverse women’s, feminist, and queer aesthetics. Shifting from the art “object” and the commodification of the body, Eyene will discuss developments in her approach leading to non-objectbased art practices, particularly sound as a discursive medium ranging from the personal and intimate, to collective socio-political positioning. Part of a preliminary research to a women artists and sound exhibition currently developed in the UK, Eyene will explore what could be encapsulated in the term “dialectics of refusal” implying: both the refusal to be silenced matched by diverse sonic modes of expression, and being silent as a form of agency; “speaking” or emitting sound from an identity/gender/ability-based position while refusing to perform assigned identities. Also included in this lecture will be a reflection on multi-layered forms of marginalisation, notably in terms of access to technology. This will lead to consider diverse sonic traditions, especially non-Western, and examine the significance of sonorities, patterns and textures pre-dating 14
the machine, as well as the interpretative shifts brought about by digital culture and the very process of digitisation. Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is a Guild Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, where she collaborates on Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual arts research project based at UCLan’s Centre for Contemporary Art, led by Professor Lubaina Himid. She is also a doctoral student at Birkbeck, University of London, with Professor Annie E. Coombes, and is writing a thesis on South African photographer George Hallett in relation to African literature. Eyene’s areas of research and curatorial practice range from contemporary African and Diaspora arts, Black British arts, and gendered art discourses, to non-object-based art practices notably sound art. Other interests include: urban cultures, music, design and socially-engaged initiatives. Her recent exhibitions include Resonances: Second Movement (Espace Croix-Baragnon, Toulouse, 2016); Murder Machine (Ormston House, Limerick, 2016); All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm (David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2015); Embodied Spaces (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2015); Residual: Traces of the Black Body (New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2015); La Parole aux Femmes (Fondation Blachère, Apt, 2014); Reflections on the Self – Five African Women Photographers (Hayward Touring exhibition, Southbank Centre, London and UK, 2011-2013). www.eyonart.org
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Vron Ware Nightingales and bombers This lecture addresses the idea that our lives are shaped by the fluctuating rhythms of ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’. Drawing on my research into whiteness, racism, gender and militarism I will think aloud about how to cultivate an ethics of intellectual inquiry that is shaped by paying closer attention to the world around us. For me, this new orientation includes being attentive to the movements and habits of birds including their song. What can the sound of the Nightingale tell us about ourselves, our histories and the times in which we live? Vron Ware, Chair of Sociology & Gender Studies in the dept of Criminology and Sociology, Kingston University. Author of Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism & History (1992/2015); Out of Whiteness (2002) with Les Back; and Military Migrants: fighting for YOUR Country (2012), my research interests encompass questions of ‘race’, whiteness, gender, national identity, militarism and historical memory, and peace education. I am increasingly fascinated by our relationship with the living world, particularly birds and other migrating species, and have been trying to factor this into my work on racism and militarism.
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Thursday 10th November Ring Di Alarm Workshop
a workshop for strategies of sonic resistance Thursday 10 Nov, 2pm - 5pm (For delegates, booked in advance) Ring Di Alarm is a workshop that explores alternative references and strategies for sonic resistance to negate the White Noise of the production of racialized cultural, social and political narratives. Presented through black, queer and feminist sound cultures, Ring Di Alarm makes propositions to engage with, dissect and undermine white supremacy in the digital domain. If whiteness is somewhere between nowhere and everywhere, how does one combat its ghosts? If white noise is also speech, what voices are erased within this construction of noise? How do these voices complicate, reconfigure and speak for themselves? By offering intimate and collective forms of sonic engagement we will gather together a variety of musical references from dancehall to disco, texts from Gloria Wekker to Édouard Glissant and references from newsfeeds to black twitter, to explore the questions in the above paragraph. Ring Di Alarm is hosted by artist and curator Barby Asante, artist Maria Guggenbichler and curator Amal Alhaag. Live steamed on http://mixlr.com/side-room Open to SGFA ticket holders only and for a limited number of attendees.
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Friday 11th November Chairs: Angus Carlyle, Cathy Lane, Holly Ingleton, Irene Revell and Louise Marshall. Still Waiting Discussion Group
Still Waiting Discussion Group is a fortnightly student-focussed research group invested in decolonising the BA Sound Arts and Design curriculum at LCC and open to all BA Sound Arts and Design students. The workshops are student-led and provide a space in which to share ideas, discuss concerns and think about the current BA Sound Arts and Design curriculum from wider perspectives than those that presently typify the current curriculum. The workshops address student-focussed sustainability, foster political awareness and social responsibility and invest in sustainable futures based on collaboration rather than competition, facilitating the creation of shared experiences. In particular we have focused our analysis upon the unacknowledged racialised and gendered bias within the BA course core reading lists, elements of which contribute to the performance of this presentation for SGFA::2016.
Session One Gabriella Beckhurst ‘Is there anything on me that doesn’t speak?’ Exploding the material edge of sonic affect
In this paper, I respond to the zones of exclusion characterised by the masking faculties of white noise as a universal, uncompromising force. I suggest that we stand to gain from treating white noise as a complex signal which evades easy capture. Through the lens of recent debates in queer theory, such as the work of Paul B. Preciado and Mel Y. Chen, I will draw a generative parallel with queer theory’s ‘toxic turn’. Where dominant ontologies of white noise effectively standardise difference, and ‘pink noise’ appears as its minor, feminine other (Tara Rodgers, 18
2010), I propose a framework of white noise as mutable and adaptable – a ‘static’ which occupies a political threshold. Chen’s concession that ‘the iconic white body is an asset that must not be allowed to become toxic’ underlines the inextricable bind of toxicity and queerness (Chen, 2011). Seen in this light, contamination throws up possibilities for white noise by enabling us to ‘tune in’ to the subtle frequencies of minor and queer transmissions, while effectively destabilising the conventional infrastructure of its current sonic definition.
Anuka Ramischwili-Schafer lap(se)
I am working on a ten minute audio-visual piece, following in the tradition of a series of two video-poetry pieces I made this year, that will explore the silence of whiteness and the silence of whiteness that spreads and imposes further silence. Both whiteness and sound are often deemed to be immaterial or ephemeral; my work explores the very materiality of both whiteness and sound & the bodily manifestations of the violence that mutates out from complicit silence. I want to probe language and how it is inherently dependent on sound (drawing on Fred Moten’s readings of language and music and Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s focus on ‘intervals’ in language and communication). I want to look at my own family history in an abstract fictionalised piece — a piece about two people in my life, a white woman and a West Asian man: how can my body feel the ways in which my mother manifests her whiteness as a barrier to opinion, decisions, choice, feeling, expression, by her racialising of gender. She halts solidarity between my father and me because she constructs his masculinity as inherently a result of his race, his brownness — I am disconnected and seeking entry, via a sort of familial backdoor of story-telling and research, into an intersectional feminism that negates the imposed masculinity of my non-whiteness. My piece invokes the importance of questioning: I want to speak, translate, transpose, and delve into and between the traces of two clashing family histories.
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Paul Tourle White Noise: Sound as heritage and the problem with crowdsourcing With the potential to deliver wide-reaching public engagement, museums, archives and other heritage organisations working with sound play a central role in setting the limits of what and who can be heard. Far from being neutral bearers of culture, however, such organisations are complex assemblages, inevitably shaped by the discourses, networks and technologies, within and through which they operate. The kinds of listening they practice and promulgate within the public sphere are just as coded as any individual’s. Sounds of our Shores was a crowdsourcing project, which called on the UK public to contribute field recordings to a new archive of British coastal sounds. I will consider the ways in which various factors led the project unwittingly to silence the sounds of a key UK coastal event of 2015: the European migrant crisis and its corollary of right-wing, antirefugee protest. A trend towards crowdsourcing in heritage practice, a tendency to place field recording at the heart of public listening projects, and discourses governing conceptualisations of sound and coast among the project partners, all contributed to SooS reproducing in its archive a sanitised account of affluent, middle class, White Britain. This in turn silenced alternative, perhaps more problematic forms of Whiteness.
Session Two Annie Goh Who Listens For Whom in Archaeoacoustics
Since its inception in the 1980s, the field of acoustic archaeology or archaeoacoustics, has garnered increasing popular and academic interest. At the crux of much of this research lie echoes, resonances and reverberations read as acoustic clues about “man’s aural past”. I would like to present some reflections stemming from my PhD research on archaeoacoustics so far, addressing how normative ideas about sound and listening, entwined along lines of gender, race and colonialism, 20
are reproduced in the literature and fieldwork. In describing how the sounding past has been framed by acoustic archaeologists, I aim to interrogate what is at stake - but remains unsaid - in the act of claiming past auralities.
Syma Tariq A Thousand Channels: De-Partitioning South Asia through critical radio practice
A Thousand Channels is a radio project and offshoot of Ancestors, a multidisciplinary events platform curated by Natasha Ginwala and which travelled South Asia in 2015. The project aims to counter received narratives of the partitioned Indian subcontinent through a myriad ways, “reading against the grain” of its brief history as a set of nation states, and involving a range of voices. A Thousand Channels is the beginning of an audiophilic attempt to re-assemble ‘ourselves’ according to shared histories and common horizons beyond Partition and postcolonial conceits. The first two episodes are free-flowing collage pieces, incorporating conversations, field recordings, phone recordings, film excerpts, internet rips, performative work, lectures and other sonic elements. Episode 4 is a longer, self-reflexive documentary about a workshop undertaken with Tentative Collective in Lahore, Pakistan. A Thousand Channels’ goal now is to activate a resonant radio platform for the subcontinent and the global south more widely, “listening against the grain” of accepted histories through collaborative radio making. This presentation will address the following topics: how to listen to South Asia, both up close and at a distance, and transmit it as an outsider; how this kind of radio practice can help to ‘decolonise’ the subcontinent; how to access difficult and/or gendered spaces to make such work; and generally, how to make meaningful claims to the region through such practice. www.athousandchannels.com
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Miriam Schickler White noise and affective encounters
Towards Critical White Noise? I will present the experimental audio walk Echoing Yafa which tells stories of Manshiyyah, a Palestinian neighbourhood that was destroyed during Israel’s “War of Independence” and now lies hidden underneath its own debris and the grass and asphalt of the streets of Tel Aviv. Echoing Yafa is composed of the enacted witness accounts of former residents of Manshiyyah, archive material, field recordings, ambient sounds and original musical pieces. As a multi-sensory, i.e. synaesthetic way of experiencing space and time, where the visual layer of the material landscape collapses and intertwines with the acoustic layer of the sound composition, the audio walk tries to raise awareness to the continued colonisation of Palestinian land. Furthermore Echoing Yafa attempts to be an anti-colonial intervention into public space, realised by the audience that temporarily actualises the neighbourhood through the act of embodied listening. While the intentions behind my work are very clear, I would like to raise questions about the validity and legitimacy of my authorship of Echoing Yafa as a Jew with an Israeli passport, questions that come up as soon as artists, academics or activists deal with issues pertaining to the other, questions that cannot be solved by the mere act of self-reflexivity.
Session Three Rommi Smith in collaboration with composer and doublebassist Jenni Molloy and rehearsal director Juliet Ellis ‘Face the Music’ and Scat: Ella Fitzgerald’s performative challenge to, and disruption of, the ghost-frequencies of Nazism and Fascism.
On the 13th February 1960, just fifteen years after the Second World War, against the backdrop of the Holocaust, Ella Fitzgerald performed “Mack the Knife” as part of a live recording at The Deutschlandhalle, Berlin. During the performance, Fitzgerald forgot Berthold Brecht’s lyric and thus the official words to the song. 22
Improvising a scat-based, lyrical performance to German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill’s music, Fitzgerald authored an alternative femaleled performative narrative to the song’s dominant masculine narrative. The recording of Fitzgerald’s performance, is entitled “Ella in Berlin” and was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in recognition of its historical and cultural significance. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s performance was an act of plurisignation: a performative challenge to Fascism and oppression; a stand against silence and silencing; and an assertion of memory against forgetting. Fitzgerald, as Jazz singer and performer, and an African-American woman, was in creative dialogue and solidarity with Weill, as composer and Jewish man and Brecht as a Socialist writer denounced by the Nazis. This lecture as performance, (part of Smith’s interdisciplinary, practiceled PhD inquiry) considers the Black, female singer as civil rights’ activist, reflecting upon how Fitzgerald’s pitch-perfect tuning and timing, disrupted the ghost-frequencies of Nazism and Fascism.
Gilles Aubry Listen that’s us! A sound ethnography on the Paul Bowles collection of Moroccan Music.
Gilles Aubry presents his current PhD research project on the “Paul Bowles collection of Moroccan traditional music”. Dating from 1959, this collection consists in 72 hours of music recordings made by the US writer and composer Paul Bowles throughout Morocco as an early - and in many ways particular – attempt at cultural preservation. Concerned with the scarcity of non-Western voices in the field of sound studies so far, the project is interested in the responses by Moroccan people which can be elicited today via listening to these recordings. By extension, the goal is to explore new fields of knowledge through sound artistic collaborations with Moroccan artists in order to address the conditions for a decolonization of listening, beyond existing cultural categories. Bowles’ listening and recording practices will be briefly situated by highlighting their singular queer colonial character. Responses by inhabitants of Tafraoute will be presented, elicited in 2012 with these recordings, followed by examples of artistic realizations which were
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inspired by these findings. Ideas for the continuation of the project will be evoked, considering possible approaches for decolonized sound practices.
Shanti Suki Osman The Exotic Bird In The Corner
The Exotic Bird In The Corner is a performance lecture and sound piece - the initial stages of research into self-fetishization of musical elements by female and non-binary identifying BPOC sound artists and musicians, as a means to confront white noise, with specific focus on the role of technology. In interviews with artists, I expect notions of gender, commodification of culture, self–fetishization and identity construction to arise. In a festival exploring the notion of access to identities and accompanying privileges through musical performances, I performed a song with digital tambura and pop vocals, vaguely in the Western European Classical key of E (according to the device). Negotiated identities (Hyder, 2004) from various musical paths I have taken, were created. A women of colour using a device to (re)create music from an assumed musical heritage portrays a vague sense of authenticity – the need of the deterritorialized to contact the homeland (Appadurai, 1990 301,2) and a hybridity, facilitating cultural authority for the marginalised (Bhabha, in Hall 1996). There are concerns about replicating the power dynamics of colonialism (Hyder 2004) and there are celebrations of reclaiming powers which sought to limit us (in Jones 1998), which the presentation will address.
INVASORIX MY GÜERX SKIN HURTS HORRIBLY. -Sí, cómo no.
As cuir-feminists in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – as our imaginary friend bell hooks so accurately termed it – we attempt to intervene in its white noise in order to interrupt its hissing seemingly tranquilizing yet numbing sound. Moreover, in the mexicano context at least half of our group are read and addressed as güerxs: the word may refer to personas with blond hair and/or fair skin and/or to their supposedly “higher” social and cultural status, thus it might be also 24
used to güeriar/flatter in order to get something. While associating white noise with an opaque and subaudible power, which hierarchically organizes bodies, lands, resources and access, among others, through a reggeatón song we seek to address these complex intersections as well as the power dynamics, blind spots, and different privilegios such as racial, class and educational aspects within our group: How do they affect, transform, challenge, hinder and lessen relationships, dialogues, work and the ethical, political and creative risks we take? How could our reggaetón song be a fertile ground to provocar cuir-feminist empowerment and a significant descolonial gesture challenging its essentializing association of “latinx” y “caribeñx” as well as its intrinsic relation with dancing, physicality and sexualidad?
Keynote Christine Eyene Coming at it from a black perspective: curatorial attempt on the sounds we make See page 14.
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Saturday 12th November Chairs: Angus Carlyle, Cathy Lane, Holly Ingleton, Irene Revell and Louise Marshall.
Keynote Vron Ware Nightingales and bombers See page 16.
Session Four Marika Pratley, Hana Aoake, Piupiu-Maya Turei, Virginia Kennard, Joanne Francey
The intention of this artwork is to engage the pragmatic questions of decolonisation in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The colonisation process in Aotearoa has lead to the silencing of indigenous citizens, the language Te Reo Māori, as well as Taonga Puoro (Traditional Māori instruments). The violent process of imperialism employed on Aotearoa has commodified both land and subjects. Colonisation has become normalised and repeated on a daily basis, through cultural discourse which privileges Pākehā (White European) culture, at the expense of Māori and Pasifika cultures. The political pragmatics of decolonisation are still a taboo subject. This work is a first collaboration between the artists, who have researched themes concerning colonial music histories, as well as the broader political dynamic of the MāoriPākehā relationship. They discuss the contemporary impact that colonialism has within both music sphere and wider New Zealand society. Through research, conversations, and artistic processes, the artists come together to explore strategies and understandings of decolonisation, rather than formulate conclusive theories inspired by a white saviour complex to ‘fix the problem’. This 26
presentation will be an audiovisual work, exploring how artists relate to the intersectionality of feminism and colonial issues in Aotearoa, and how this impacts on Tino Rangatiratanga (Māori Sovereignty).
Side Room and Barby Asante Ring di Alarm—strategies of sonic resistance
Ring Di Alarm is a workshop that explores alternative references and strategies for sonic resistance to negate the White Noise of the production of racialized cultural, social and political narratives. Presented through black, queer and feminist sound cultures, Ring Di Alarm makes propositions to engage with, dissect and undermine white supremacy in the digital domain. If whiteness is somewhere between nowhere and everywhere, how does one combat its ghosts? If white noise is also speech, what voices are erased within this construction of noise? How do these voices complicate, reconfigure and speak for themselves? By offering intimate and collective forms of sonic engagement we will gather together a variety of musical references from dancehall to disco, texts from Gloria Wekker to Édouard Glissant and references from newsfeeds to black twitter, to explore the questions in the above paragraph. Ring Di Alarm is hosted by artist and curator Barby Asante, artist Maria Guggenbichler and curator Amal Alhaag.
Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül (Istanbul Queer Art Collective) On SOUTH No.3: The Border Oath Version
SOUTH no.3 // The Border Oath Version is the video documentation of a performance by Istanbul Queer Art Collective, which was performed in Athens for Sound Acts 2016. The piece was performed by Seda Ergül, Tuna Erdem and Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and shot by Burak Serin. SOUTH no.3 is a Fluxus performance score by Takehisa Kosugi in which the performers are asked to turn the word “South” into sounds by pronouncing every syllable and letter, in every combination possible. In remaking SOUTH, Istanbul Queer Art Collective replaced the word “South” with the military oath Turkish soldiers are obliged to take each
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and every time they start their border watch duty. As part of the compulsory military service every man is obliged to fulfil regardless of their ethnic background, the oath acts as a disciplinary mechanism that re/produces the ideology of the unitary state and becomes the broad-based signal that produces the ’White Turk’. When queer women performers who are not eligible for military duty deconstruct this text, its white noise turns into a queer experiment that questions the stability of physical borders which are the utmost producers of whiteness in the age of the “refugee crises”.
Poulomi Desai “Black Noise/Noisy Black” I make noise because of the silence…
This is a proposal for a ten minute experimental, performance, based on the following ideas and using examples of my own work: - Deliberate mis(s)use of the language of audio engineering as a metaphor for space - Black Noise as pure silence, an output of an active noise control system that cancels out existing noise - essentially negative noise. - “Awaaz” beyond ideas of authenticity and being a pirate. - Neo-ethnology and the desire to disintegrate / promulgate the Loud British South Asian Queer woman’s “voice” and listening to the black heart. Invitation not application. - Creating the tangible in sound studies, gender, feminism and activism? Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Gayatri Spivak’s ideas of the subaltern (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”), rhetorical listening - whiteness studies (Krista Ratcliffe) and eavesdropping.
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“Of course we’re not born loud - or soft-speakers - we learn to use the volume level that prevails in our culture and then turn it up or lower it depending on our subculture and peer group.” Anne Karpf, The Human Voice.
Session Five Nicola Woodham The Mercurial Fountain
Surely neoliberalism is the embodiment of white noise. Intersectionalities are co-opted as soon as they are voiced. We have to keep on the move, be mercurial, devious. Neoliberalism as a radical market fantasy idealises identity blindness, while at the same time it promises choice driven diversity. But it relies on the material reality of violent inequality and hate crimes directed at POC, queer, disabled, non-privileged people. How to find wriggle room in its stronghold? Mood Media (was Muzak) provide multimedia ‘solutions’ to influence in store/online shopping behaviour. They accent the importance of ‘audio identity’ as a way to animate the brand so that the consumer encounter will be a ‘human’ one. I propose to queer and misuse some of Mood Media’s tools to liquify my vocal ‘identity’. I propose a 10 minute live vocal performance ‘The Mercurial Fountain’. I use lines of text from Mood Design’s blog posts tagged ‘voice’. I use a studio microphone. I speak with vocal actor tones such as ‘bubbly, ‘warm’, ‘dynamic’ which all seek to enforce the generic ‘human touch’. I interrupt with repetition of the lines, a break down of syllables and improvisation and disrupt further with live VSTs: Bit crusher, Wobbulator based on Oram’s, glitch, delay, panning until what remains is a slippery and intangible soundscape.
Dan Scott The Invisible Knapsack Remixed: On white male privilege in the sound arts #5 “I can field record nearly anywhere in the world, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.” #17 “I can make noisy, repetitive or “poor quality” recordings and not have people put this down to my color and/or gender.” Dan Scott will present a re-imagining of Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 text 29
“White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack”. The text consists of 50 examples of the privileges afforded McIntosh, a white woman, within her life and work at the time of writing, and references work, social and economic situations where this privilege plays out. Entries include, “If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.” And “I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.” McIntosh’s text is an influential and inspirational work within race theory, privilege theory and intersectional understandings of power. Dan has re-written the entries, with the help of colleagues in the sound arts and with the blessing of McIntosh, to reflect and explore the state of privilege within discipline.
Rebecca Bruton The Heard Surrounds
In my composition The Heard Surrounds, I have emplaced technoindustrial ambient noise(s) within Rosi Braidotti’s analysis of advanced capitalism, or the “pluralistic proliferation of quantified and commodified differences”, where “power functions not so much by binary oppositions but in a fragmented and allpervasive manner”. What is foregrounded and valued within this field of difference is determined by an imbalanced distribution of sense and perception. Braidotti asserts that in order to resist this “rhizomic or weblike structure”, it is necessary to “start from micro-instances of embodied and embedded self and the complex web of social relations that compose subject positions”. Racial theorist Fred Moten describes a similar approach as the “revolution of the surround”. Working with practices drawn from new music and sound studies, I have attempted to invert the traditional foreground/background relationship within art song by multiplying, fragmenting and bifurcating text within a field of noise. By embedding what is normally a unified, foregrounded object (the song) into a drone-based sonic environment, I hope to direct the listener’s attention towards multiple, scattered sites of becoming within the surround.
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Natasha Lall LOW-LABOUR DJING
In an age and locale of portable laptops, virtual mixing software and streaming it is easier than ever to become an instant DJ. Automated beat-matching and algorithmic playlists provide a less laborious task as a ‘disc jockey’ per say but perhaps leave more space for those performing excess labour elsewhere to enter the DJ scene. This presentation documents the exhaustive lifestyles of queer and poc DJs whose lowlabour digital practices focus less on their audio-technical skillset and more on community wellbeing. With a focus to plan nights that support minority groups and work against discrimination and gentrification, the DJs discuss the possible superfluity of prioritising technical skill over intersectional representation in recent clubnights. Expanding on where else their energy is spent as activists and carers the DJs present a new criterion for musicianship: social ethics over technical skill. The dismay with the social dynamics of London’s existing club scene is put forward for discussion and a re-prioritising of issues is proposed through a contemporary, digital and “low culture” lens.
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Bios Angus Carlyle
Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape and co-director of CRiSAP. He edited the book Autumn Leaves (2007) and with Cathy Lane co-edited On Listening (2013) and co-wrote In The Field (2013). His artworks have included 51° 32 ‘ 6.954” N / 0° 00 ‘ 47.0808” W (2008), Noli Me Tangere (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo (2009) and Air Pressure (2011-2013), a collaboration with anthropologist Rupert Cox. In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain (2016) is his last field recording project and A Downlands Index (2016) his first solo book, an exercise in nature writing on the move.His installation A Crossing Bell was part of the Estuary Festival 2016.
Annie Goh
Annie Goh is an artist and researcher working primarily with sound, space, electronic media and generative processes within their social and cultural contexts. She holds degrees in Sound Studies, Generative Art and German & European Studies. Recent exhibitions and performances include Sexing Sound (Chicago, US), Höhlenmediale (Wendelstein, DE), Arthackday at LEAP and transmediale (Berlin, DE) and Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo, JP). She has co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival since 2013 and has lectured at Berlin University of Arts (Art and Media) and Humboldt University (Media Theory). She is currently undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Media and Communications as recipient of the Stuart Hall PhD Scholarship.
Anuka Ramischwili-Schafer
I am a filmmaker from Georgia, currently undertaking an MA in Sound Arts as a means to working on extending and breaking into moments in time through a deeper exploration of sound. I come from a splintered background and thus am always working on piecing stories together and folding them in on each other: my work looks at themes of diaspora, displacement, translation, and dysphoria. My short films have been 32
shown in various countries including at White Nights Festival Riga, European Student Film Festival Prague, NeoMex Mexico City, and PostDigital Imaginaries Brighton: last year Kontrabassi was short-listed at 5th place at Plzeň Film Festival. I am interested in celebration and song and am currently undertaking a two-person collaboration in remixing trauma: morphing screams into song.
Cathy Lane
Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic interested in using spoken word, field recording and archive material to explore our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. Currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective. Her books include Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (RGAP, 2008) and with Angus Carlyle In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), and On Listening (2013). Cathy is Professor of Sound Arts and co-director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) at University of the Arts London.
Christine Eyene
Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is a Guild Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, where she collaborates to Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual arts research project based at UCLan’s Centre for Contemporary Art, led by Professor Lubaina Himid. She is also a doctoral student at Birkbeck, University of London, with Professor Annie E. Coombes, and is writing a thesis on South African photographer George Hallett in relation to African literature. Eyene’s areas of research and curatorial practice range from contemporary African and Diaspora arts, Black British arts, and gendered art discourses, to non-object-based art practices notably sound art. Other interests include: urban cultures, music, design and socially-engaged initiatives. Her recent exhibitions include Resonances: Second Movement (Espace Croix-Baragnon, Toulouse, 2016); Murder Machine (Ormston
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House, Limerick, 2016); All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm (David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2015); Embodied Spaces (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2015); Residual: Traces of the Black Body (New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2015); La Parole aux Femmes (Fondation Blachère, Apt, 2014); Reflections on the Self – Five African Women Photographers (Hayward Touring exhibition, Southbank Centre, London and UK, 2011-2013). www.eyonart.org
Dan Scott
Dan is an artist based in Kent, he has has been working with sound since he was a teenager and completed an MA in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication in 2010, gaining him a distinction. Dan’s sound works explores time, memory, modes of listening and the uncanniness of everyday sound. Projects include: Ordinal 5, a sound work for dancers performed at the Tate Modern; Covas do Rio Cover Versions, a vocal cover version of a Portugese village; Field Recordings of former South London Windmills; an installation based around recordings made at the sites of old windmills and Radio Yesterday; broadcast for 24 hours on London’s Resonance FM. Dan is working on an LP release of readings by Iain Sinclair for Test Centre. Dan also works collaboratively with Trish Scott creating site-specific works that playfully explore the narratives of places. Projects have included a false history of a Portugese marble quarry, a change management programme for a country park in Kent and a quest to revive the herring industry in a small Icelandic village. Alongside his art practice Dan teaches and runs workshops in sound and listening. Recent teaching work includes running a module on listening at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and a six month schools project with the London International Festival of Theatre involving 7 schools across London, drawing inspiration from LIFT’s archive at Goldsmiths to create new and inspiring pieces of installation and performance. 34
Gabriella Beckhurst
Gabriella Beckhurst is a London-based artist, writer and researcher interested in how performance, sonic and film practices intersect with feminist queer politics, technology and desire. She has exhibited her work at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; OUTPOST, Norwich; and the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York. She is a recent graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, where she completed an MA in the Department of Visual Cultures.
Gilles Aubry
Gilles Aubry is a Swiss sound artist living in Berlin and a PhD student in media anthropology at the Bern University. Based on an auditory approach of the real, his work includes researches on material, historical and cultural aspects of sound and listening. He uses field recordings, voices, music and sound archives to create live performances, installations and movies. From 2010 to 2012 he was a guest artist of the Global Prayers research project in Berlin, focusing on the use of sound technology in neo-pentecostal communities in Kinshasa with exhibitions and performances at the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin and Camera Austria in Graz. In 2013 he was an artist in residence at CONA in Mumbai, researching on material aspects of sound practices in the Bollywood film industry. His installation “And who sees the mystery” was shown at the 2014 Art Biennale in Marrakech. His latest project „Jewel of the Ear“ with Rob Millis focuses on the early days of shellac music records in India. It was premiered at the Art’s Birthday festival in Berlin, followed by a European tour and a research residency in India in 2015. website : www.earpolitics.net
Holly Ingleton
is a cultural worker and feminist sound studies scholar. Theirs is a transdisciplinary performative practice, exploring sound in an expanded and often dematerialised field, through archives, conversations, interventions, hidden herstrories and historical amnesias, tuning into feminist frequencies within sites of the juxtapolitical. Holly is involved as archivist and educator for the Her Noise Archive, editor of www. hernoise.org, author of www.feministfrequencies.org and founding cocollaborator of Sound:Gender:Feminism:Activism. They have performed
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and exhibited at London’s Tate Modern, the ICA and with Electra, presented at festivals and symposia around the world and published in Contemporary Music Review, Reflections on Process in Sound and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Holly currently lives in London and is a Researcher at CRiSAP and Associate Lecturer Sound Arts & Design at London College of Communication.
INVASORIX
INVASORIX is a working group interested in songs, music videos, publications, tarot readings and performative presentations as a form of queerfeminist protest. Through a continuous dialogue among themselves and with their imaginative friends, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Pedro Lemebel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María Sabina, Patti Smith and Annie Sprinkle, they question gender roles and the intentions of artists, reflect on precarity and dream about alternative and/or utopian ways of living and being. At first (Spring 2013), eight women artists composed INVASORIX. At work reunions sometimes there were only two of us, some left the group and others joined in. Currently we are ten women artists between 25 and 38 years old who live and work in Mexico City: Daria Chernysheva, Alejandra Contreras, Nina Hoechtl, Maj Britt Jensen, Liz Misterio, Una Pardo Ibarra, Naomi Rincón G allardo, Mirna Roldán, Nabil Yanai and Adriana Soriano. Six of us are Mexicans and four have adopted Mexico as their home (since 14, 13, 9 and 3 years, respectively). Moreover, one of us became a mother when Chila was born a little over two years ago. Chila participates in our reunions, performances and music videos.
Marika Pratley, Hana Aoake, Piupiu-Maya Turei, Virginia Kennard, Joanne Francey
This collaboration is between culturally diverse artists of Māori, Tauiwi and Pakeha ethnicities. This is the first time they have collaborated as a group.
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Hana Pera Aoake (Tainui, Ngāti Raukawa) is an artist and poet based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Hana primarily works within the Fresh and Fruity collective. Hana makes work which explores digitality, social class, mental illness, sex work, colonisation, aliens, cyborgs, and
humour. Piupiu-Maya Turei (NgÄ ti Kahungungu-ki-Wairarapa me Atihaunui-aPaparangi) is ½ of E-Kare - a musicxart project based in Te-Whanganuia-Tara. Its work looks into decolonisation, religion, power and death. (^v^)~ Joanne Francey (Scottish/Pakeha) is a performance/ visual artist and cult leader. Her masters project The Church of Worship is a net based performance and writing project exploring celebrity worship and the simulation of devotion. Marika Pratley (Greek Cypriot/Tauiwi) is a queer sound artist. In 2015 she composed A Symphony of Sloths and Music for Baths, works exploring therapeutic gestures. She recently wrote an article on Gender Inequity for Writing Around Sound (Vol. 2), a NZ Sonic Art journal. www. soundcloud.com/marikapratley Virginia Kennard (Pakeha) is a performance artist, whose work has been exhibited internationally. Her 2015 exhibition you occupy my body by looking explored gender identity, and her previous work How do I look? was featured in Sound::Gender:Feminism::Activism 2014. In September she commences a MA Performance at Leeds Beckett University. http:// viggiq-howdoilook.strikingly.com/
Miriam Schickler
Miriam Schickler aka Miranda De La Frontera is a trained social anthropologist, sound artist and activist. In her sound works she mainly focusses on political themes and is interested in the affective translation of texts and discourses into sound and vibration as well as exploring the sonic possibilities of challenging established notions of representation. She lives and works in Berlin.
Natasha Lall
Natasha Lall is a multidisciplinary artist exploring dysphoria in the digital realm. Predominantly working with film, but also with text and as a DJ,
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their work comments on issues of hyper-reality, excessive research and digital body politics. They have recently exhibited films at Assembly Point London, talked at Sound Acts Athens and released text with Dysphoria Collective of London. Recent DJ performances as DJ Kerrigan include Vogue Fabrics, Buster Mantis and The Queen Adelaide. Lall lives in London and currently studies BA Sound Arts & Design at London College of Communication. Lall hosts the femme/female fronted clubnight GALCORE as part of Hannah Quinlan Anderson and Rosie Hastings’ @GAYBAR series. Upcoming work includes a score for the film Brown Queers in collaboration with Michelle Williams Gamaker and the BFI.
Nicola Woodham
Nicola Woodham makes non-verbal sounds and uses audio devices to distort her voice in her performances. These noises have been compared to animal wails, insects buzzing, mechanical grinding or electronic musical instruments. She uses effects pedals and often a contact microphone taped to her throat and resonating vocal cords so as to speak from the inside. These sounds are frenetic, heightened, eerie, anxious. The creatures that evolve during the performance exist somewhere between figments and possible beings: a gas-masked, vibrating, failing entity; a dueting, vaudeville witch with split voice; an apocalyptic gorgon. The non-human-verbal is a way for her to project a sense of voices to come or in a process of becoming. Recent vocal performances and listening sessions in 2016: Artaud On The Beach directed by Sylvère Lotringer at The Showroom, London; Sound Acts, Athens, Greece; Manpower, Lisbon, Portugal (in collaboration with Erinyes). Recent commissions: Soundscapes [MEX-UK], Fonoteca Nacional de México, Mexico City and Electronic Voice Phenomena Session, Shoreditch Town Hall in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art in 2015. www. nicolawoodham.com, http://cargocollective.com/erinyessound/About
Paul Tourle
Paul is entering the third year of his doctoral studies at UCL Institute
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of Archaeology. His research centres on the conceptualization of everyday sounds as cultural heritage, and aims to encourage critical dialogue between the two new fields of sound studies and critical heritage studies. More broadly, his research interests include noise, digital heritage, heritage education, and the prospects for an activist heritage practice. This summer, as part of his studies, he began a long term listening project, working with residents and volunteers at a North London homeless shelter.
Poulomi Desai
Poulomi Desai is a multimedia artist and activist making works that incorporate radio noise, performance, composition, video, sound and installation. Her on-going project “Experiments with Noise” explores sound and colour frequencies as an allegorical investigation into perception, identify and listening. She also runs and curates the Usurp Art space and has exhibited and performed internationally. More info: http://poulomidesai.tumblr.com http://www.usurp.org.uk
Rebecca Bruton
Rebecca Bruton is an emerging composer, performer and researcher based in Vancouver, BC (Canada). As one half of the noise/soundpoetry duo Moss Moss Not Moss (with Canadian-Icelandic poet a rawlings), Rebecca has presented original work at Tectonics Festival Glasgow, and has had her composition and performance work featured on BBC’s Hear and Now radio program. She was recently selected to participate in the prestigious 2016-2017 PIVOT professional mentorship program for Canadian Composers, presented by the Canadian League of Composers. She has released two full-length studio albums, under the pseudonym ‘Rebecca Flood’. She is also co-creative producer of Tidal ~ Signal, a Vancouver-based festival dedicated to increasing representation of women and transgendered artists within the fields of sound art and experimental music. Rebecca is completing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice at Simon Fraser University. http://rebeccabruton.com
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Rommi Smith in collaboration with composer and doublebassist Jenni Molloy and rehearsal director Juliet Ellis.
Rommi Smith is a poet, playwright, performer who has held major writing residencies for organisations ranging from The British Council to the BBC. She is the inaugural poet-in-residence for Keats House and the inaugural writer-in-residence for Parliament, the first such appointment in British and Parliamentary history. Currently a John Barnard Scholar at the School of English, University of Leeds, Rommi is in the first year of her interdisciplinary, practiceled, PhD utilising poetry and performance as creative methodologies to celebrate and re-present Blues and Jazz women: E: rommi@rommismith.co.uk or romsmith@yahoo.co.uk W: www.rommi-smith.co.uk T: @rommismith Collaborators: Jenni Molloy is a critically acclaimed jazz double bassist and composer, known for her live and recording project ‘Bach ReLoaded Trio +’ www. bachreloaded.com. She has collaborated on numerous theatre, poetry and improvised music projects, internationally. A much in demand jazz bassist, Jenni is also a Goju Ryu martial artist, running the Tsuyoi Kokoro Dojo in Leeds www.tsuyoikokoro.co.uk Juliet Ellis is an actor, theatre-maker, performance artist and filmmaker. She recently completed a four-month residency at the prestigious Binger Lab in Amsterdam. As well as creating her own work, Juliet has also devised work with renowned artists such as New York based Julie Tolentino, DV8’S Nigel Charnock and Third Angel. www.julietellis.com
Shanti Suki Osman
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Shanti Suki Osman (1983, Nottingham, UK; MA Music Education, Institute of Education, AHRC Studentship 2012 / 2013). Shanti Suki is a Berlin-based musician, curator and educator, working in singing, songwriting, performance and sound art, musicmaking and radio. Her workshops consider the themes: identities and privilege, cultural commodification and appropriation, feminism, (post)colonial criticisms. With Late Nights In Squat Bars she writes and sings postcolonial feminist electropop with Dafne Della Dafne, and curates festivals and group shows receiving government grants in 2013, 2014, 2015. She is
half of the London/Berlin based electronic synthpop duo, Coyer Koya, who released their debut EP Ease Tension in July 2016. In her monthly radio show Hidden Stories on Colaboradio, she tells stories with words and music about activism, politics and art from various corners of the world. Recent projects include the autobiographical performance series Skewed, looking at selffetishization of musical elements and musicians of colour (debuted at Reflektor Festival 2016). Shanti Suki moderates discussions on these topics in the panel discussion series, The Artist’s Role in Society. She attends KontextSchule at Universität der Kunst, Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin. sukiosman.wordpress.com/about Latenightsinsquatbars.org coyerkoya.bandcamp.com mixcloud.com/hiddenstories
Side Room and Barby Asante
The Side Room is an informal initiative, founded by curator Amal Alhaag and artist Maria Guggenbichler in Amsterdam. The project takes the shape of a nomadic meeting room for intersectional feminist, queer, anti-colonial and anti-racist discourses and practices. The activities hosted at the Side Room range from consciousness-raising groups to parties, reading groups to workshops, film screenings to non-sense events and absurd rituals. Barby Asante is a London-based artist, curator and educator who’s work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. This collaboration has been formed through an on going across the water dialogues that have explored their ideas through, Skype calls and exchanges in London and Amsterdam exploring sonic biographies, ancestral and Diasporic language and the connections and differences in the African Diasporic experiences in The Netherlands and the UK. They will also meet and connect together with OOR Salon in Zurich at SHE SPEAKS SILENCE a 3-day gathering and events program, which 41
focuses on female, gender non-binary, feminist and emancipatory sound and listening.
Still Waiting Discussion Group
Karol Stefanowicz, Natasha Lall, Robin Buckley and Holly Ingleton. Karol Stefanowicz (aka Karol Streisand), born in 1993 in Białystok is a Polish multi-media artist with Tatar roots. Currently, a BA final year student of Sound Arts and Design at University of the Arts London, he has studied at 10 schools in 4 countries throughout his education. The international upbringing and passion for travelling reflect in his practice; “Dance Where I Want To” - a video art project about freestyle dancing and travelling, has got him to work with big names like Years and Years and Ryan Heffington as a dancer and secured him a choreography commission from Dazed & Confused magazine. “Listen to my (hi)story” is a new audio-visual project documenting personal histories of people he encounters during his travels, with the intention of breaking language barriers within the arts and academic realm and recording history that otherwise may be forgotten. Further work includes abstract soundscapes, song writing and music videos that criticise politics and encourage activism. Robin Buckley is a sound artist and musician studying in London. Currently at London College of Communication, working towards a BA in Sound Arts & Design, Robin’s work explores the politics and aesthetics of academic institutions, club culture and technology. Robin has presented work at Sound Acts Athens, and has collaborated with Faron Ray (club dead) and Sam Cottington (do you even know what a screaming faggot looks like). Robin has released music under the alias rkss across a variety of formats on labels such as Where to Now? and Alien Jams. A forthcoming lanyard and eight-channel electroacoustic piece, Brostep in the Style of Florian Hecker, is to be released in November on Conditional Records. They also presents a radio program for Resonance Extra, called Lossless Communication, exploring sound discovery in the internet era. Natasha Lall - see page 37. Dr Holly Ingleton - see page 35. 42
Syma Tariq
Syma Tariq is a radio journalist, writer and editor. She has worked as a reporter for publications such as Monocle, The Guardian, and The Africa Report, and as a freelance copy editor for The Guardian’s news and opinion desks in London. She is a regular contributor to Monocle24 radio, covering urbanism and social issues, politics, business and culture, and her writing has also been published in publications such as Public Domain, Quartz and BrownBook. Between 2013 and 2015, Syma co-developed the music platform Waterfalls, in collaboration with Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon. As part of Waterfalls she took part in the Walk&Talk residency, Azores, where she composed a piece for a 12,000-year-old lava tunnel as well as producing a series of field recordings from the islands. She began developing A Thousand Channels, an offshoot of the Ancestors public programme as part of the 56th Venice Biennale exhibition My East is Your West, in March 2015.
Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül (Istanbul Queer Art Collective)
Istanbul Queer Art Collective was founded in 2012 to facilitate the production of performance art by queer artists. The group consists of four performance artists Onur Gökhan Gökçek, Seda Ergül, Tuna Erdem, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and a video artist Burak Serin who documents the performances, turning them into video art. Istanbul Queer Art Collective firmly believes that both gender and sexuality are performative and in constant flux and tries to express this belief through a type of performance art that provokes participation. Currently Istanbul Queer Art Collective is engaged in the ongoing project of remaking Fluxus performances, through a process of first “queerifying” and then adapting them to Turkey. As part of this project the collective has performed numerous Fluxus ‘scores’, transforming them into endurance performances, site-specific performances and performances in public places. Their work has been exhibited at various venues such as Blok Art Space, Mamut Art Fair, If Istanbul Independent Film Festival, Istanbul LGBT Pride Exhibition, Zurich Les Belles De Nuit Festival, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Queer Future Exhibition and Athens Sound Acts Festival. 43
Tuna Erdem is an artist and film scholar who works at Istanbul Bilgi University. Seda Ergül is an artist and independent scholar who works on sound art. Both have published on queer theory in various edited volumes in Turkish. Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül are partners in both life and work, and they have been engaged in various forms of art together since 2004. They are the founding members of Istanbul Queer Art Collective. Together they write an art blog on contemporary art exhibitions in Turkey. They have edited a volume of articles on the various forms of fetishism called Fetish Substitute (Fetiş İkame, Sel Publishing, 2014).
Vron Ware
Vron Ware, Chair of Sociology & Gender Studies in the dept of Criminology and Sociology, Kingston University. Author of Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism & History (1992/2015); Out of Whiteness (2002) with Les Back; and Military Migrants: fighting for YOUR Country (2012), my research interests encompass questions of ‘race’, whiteness, gender, national identity, militarism and historical memory, and peace education. I am increasingly fascinated by our relationship with the living world, particularly birds and other migrating species, and have been trying to factor this into my work on racism and militarism.
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The Programme Committee for SGFA2016 was Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle and Holly Ingleton.
Many thanks to Lisa Hall, Sara Martins, Holly McConnell, Luminita Molico, the peer review panel, technical support by Richard Coles, Ciaran Harte, Paul Richardson and all volunteers.
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Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) A University of the Arts London Research Centre, based at London College of Communication. www.crisap.org 48