RE-MIXING THE STAGE

RE-MIXING THE STAGE. CIRCULAR LISTENING SESSIONS opens the question of how to meet and listen to each other without hierarchies, impositions, frames and modern categories. It proposes at first sight a “simple” way of encounter that searches for what Silvia Cusicanqui calls a Ch´ixi world, where opposite carriers of contradictions live together without seeking synthesis. [1] By stressing the sonic, and following Jacques Atalli’s posture towards music and sound we see that “science, message, and time-music is all of that simultaneously. It is, by its very presence, a mode of communication between man and his environment, a mode of social expression, and duration itself. It is therapeutic, purifying, enveloping, liberating; it is rooted in a comprehensive conception of knowledge about the body, in a pursuit of exorcism through noise and dance. But it is also past time to be produced, heard, and exchanged.” [2] In this way, RE-MIXING THE STAGE. CIRCULAR LISTENING SESSIONS aims to be a space for possibility where we can listen together to different kinds of knowledge carried by rhythms and oralities, and to different times and places. 

The world is diverse. How to really understand ourselves as one part of this diversity? And by doing so, unlearn the colonial legacies still very present nowadays around the world and particularly in our German context. Seeing facism rising around the planet, we ask how we can, in our context, contribute to unlearning and questioning the feeling and believing of superiority of certain people, among cultures, life and nature?

This feeling of superiority is deeply rooted in coloniality and this feeling and world understanding is visible in many daily practices. For instance, the structure for listening in church is vertical, as well as in the concert hall where the stage is above the people or the DJ booth where the DJ is elevated and separated from the dancefloor. Another clear example is the painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by german painter Caspar David Friedrich, where the man sees the world from above, separated from him, like a space in which this man is not inserted, with an elevated and distant vantage point where everything that is not the modern man becomes an object. We propose the sonic as a counter positionality to the distant and elevated vantage point. And the deep listening as a way of challenging and unlearning the epistemic violence. [3]

RE-MIXING THE STAGE. CIRCULAR LISTENING SESSIONS is a multi-chapter project born from the Circle of Words, a practice from the Wiwa among other Colombian indigenous communities. [4] It has as well roots in the Rueda de Cumbia practice in Colombia or the Roda de Samba practice in Brazil, where there is no stage and people gather around the musicians for the musical ritual. It follows this model of encounter, proposing to emphasize the constitution of the space through the practice of “deep listening” in a community. It searches for what Carla Zaccagnini in Correspondence #1 calls the “Jungle Experience.” According to Carla Zaccagnini, “there is no vantage point for looking at the jungle as it would be without us”. [5] In our project, we seek for this experience from the sonic perspective, proposing a space for listening to different ways of understanding and inhabiting the world, feeling pluriversal rhythms and grooves. We wish to provide and offer a way of experiencing them that is an immersed feeling rather than observing from the panoramic view.

How to heal the way we listen to each other? How to start listening, without the colonial listening habits mentioned by Raven Chacon’s report [6], to the epistemologies around us honoring their different positionalities? The infiltration of imperial violence, is structural and confuses the ritual of sending and receiving, adding layers that change the dynamics radically. We believe in the sonic as a carrier of different epistemologies, memories, knowledge, and want to give time to listening as a way to unlearn, question, reveal and complexify the colonial legacies still very present around us; as a way to remember ancestral and present practices that carry us in the search for transformation and healing of the present struggles.