UNTRAINING THE EAR: LISTENING SESSION N°3

With the  UNTRAINING THE EAR LISTENING SESSIONS  we propose exercises to decipher sound beyond its contextual affiliation of geography, genre, and valences of identity. It is an attempt to press II [pause] to the daily storm of sonic vibrations, and voice a call to examine and explore the auditory beyond the hearing and start to LISTEN. The proposed format arises as a fundamental inquiry into modes and possibilities of listening. We feel an urgency to reconsider and rephrase postcolonial discourses as well as explore the relations with new hybrid-contemporary sound identities and the polycultural times.

By commissioning new works and echoing rare archival body of works broadcasted on public radio and premiered in an art space, Deutschlandfunk Kultur becomes the "instant, immaterial and transportable exhibition" space that suggests listening in-between radio frequencies, and lines of time and language. To contextualize how we listen to the world today we also need to replay the past of abounding sonic references. We will rhetorically navigate through archives of maverick composers in the attempt to re-index their contributions, to create other possible genealogies and narratives.

For the third Listening Session BUT REALITY HAS NO SYNONYMS  we invite Lucrecia Dalt and Regina De Miguel to explore ways of voicing life-form entanglements using the extra-musical and extra-sonic sources of language. Proposing a transtemporal mode of listening, with a possible emphasis on a transcultural dialogue, respectively on topics and conflicts that traverse cultures and geographies.

In the attempt to UNTRAIN THE EAR, we suggest an alternative way to listen to music, sound and noise, through the program SAVVY Contemporary becomes a live listening station and Deutschlandfunk Kultur becomes an exploratory sonorous 'exhibition space' which invites audiences to an inquiry into sound cultures.

Listening with and to Lucrecia Dalt and Regina De Miguel, a note from the artists:

"For our participation in Untraining The Ear, Listening Session N3 at SAVVY Contemporary, we will work with and consider the gallery space as a capsule from which we explore the unknown or hostile territories linked to geographies of violence found in the extractive space of the imaginaries, tightly associated with cultural and technological mechanisms of representation. It is a capsule that derives in a self-alienated black box, as a speculative alternatve to the world we know. Starting from the anomaly of the space, fueled by desire, constituting a sort of secret landscape. A place where perspectives collide. A shortcut to something, a displacement. A space of transition to another world, something like a black hole that not only transports you but transforms as it goes.

Playing with various layers of sonorous proximities, we will allude to the fetish, to the intimate and distanced hallucination that dislocate territorial conventions. We will propose an unlocking process by pointing out those areas that go unnoticed, places where other rumours are hidden, folds of matter inhabited by presences, pulses, materials, evocations, capable of invoking a trans-subjective character, living and nonliving entities, organic and inorganic, arising from relational anomalies. We will fetish the fetish and appeal to the corporeal unconscious, and to magic, in a cycle of action and interminable reaction without beginning or end, in which reactions are more important than initial actions, "we will not be striving to reveal that secret whose exposure would destroy it".

LUCRECIA DALT  Born in Pereira, Colombia in 1980, and now based in Berlin, Germany, Lucrecia Dalt has seen her profile as musician, sound artist and radio producer develop into high international regard. Her recorded albums - numbering seven in total, since her 2005 debut - encompass the dual worlds of intelligent avant-garde and contemporary electronic music, drawing in influences from her academic background as a civil engineer as well as musics and philosophies from across the world.

REGINA DE MIGUEL Born in Málaga, Spain in 1977 and based in Berlin, works as an artist through critical and interdisciplinary agency in processes and convergences focused on producing hybrid objects and knowledge. She has set up solo exhibitions in: Aura Nera, Santa Mónica, Barcelona, 2016; Ansible, Maisterravalbuena Gallery, Madrid, 2015; All knowledge is enveloped in darkness, Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, 2014;  Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction, General Public, Berlin 2011, El aire aún no respirado, MUSAC, León 2008.