Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn

22 February 2019 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

What does it mean to die within the posthuman convergence, which positions us – humans and non-humans – between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction? This contemporary convergence results in the shifting of boundaries between bio-power and necro-politics, life and death, the government of the living and the practices of dying. I will refer to a neo-materialist philosophy of non-human life as 'Zoe' and argue that both the concept of life and that of death need to be approached with more complexity and more attention to power differences.

Rosi Braidotti is a Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her publications include: Patterns of Dissonance (1991), Metamorphoses (2002), Transpositions (2006), La philosophie, lá où on né l’attend pas (2009), Nomadic Subjects (1994; 2011), Nomadic Theory (2011), The Posthuman (2013). She recently co-edited Conflicting Humanities (2016) with Paul Gilroy and The Posthuman Glossary (2018) with Maria Hlavajova.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Post-Screening Discussion: Maeve Brennan in conversation with Mirna Belina

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Following the screening of Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018), Maeve Brennan discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience.

Maeve Brennan’s film Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018) takes a documentary approach, gathering a series of subtle yet penetrating soundings of human beings’ impact on the natural environment. Undisturbed, and largely unchanged for millions of years, bats’ nocturnal rhythms are being increasingly interrupted by the presence of wind turbines. While noting how such well-intentioned technological developments are affecting the atmosphere in ways we do not always appreciate, Brennan also illuminates how scientific research has revealed a whole sensory dimension that we were previously oblivious to.

The film circles around the figure of Donald Griffin, pioneering zoologist and early advocate of animal consciousness, whose researches into bat navigation helped shape our understanding of the concept of echolocation. Following his example, Brennan reminds us, too, of other natural marvels – from the mysteries of animal evolution or the deep historical time of geology – that reveal not only our humbling insignificance in the bigger scheme of things, but also the disproportionate damage we are capable of doing to the planet.

Director: Maeve Brennan; Director of photography: Jamie Quantrill; Editor: Mariko Montpetit; Producer: Laura Shacham

Listening in the Dark was commissioned for the Jerwood/​FVU Awards 2018: Unintended Consequences, a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella.

Maeve Brennan is a London-based artist and filmmaker. Her recent solo exhibitions include Listening in the Dark at Jerwood Space, London, and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; The Drift at Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Spike Island, Bristol (all 2017); and Jerusalem Pink, OUTPOST, Norwich (2016). She was educated at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a fellow of the Home Workspace Programme at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2013 – 14). She received the Jerwood/​FVU Award 2018 and her film The Drift was screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Post-Screening Discussion: Tony Cokes in conversation with Mirna Belina.

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Following the screening of Black Celebration (1988, 17 min) Tony Cokes discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience.

In Black Celebration (1988, 17 min), Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighbourhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive counter-reading. ​‘This videotape involves the riots that took place in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California in August, 1965 and the Black neighbourhoods of other American cities during the 1960s. The black and white work uses newsreel footage from events in Watts, Boston, Newark, and Detroit interspersed with text commentary. The newsreel voiceovers are replaced by music. The intent of the piece is to introduce a reading that will contradict received ideas which characterise these riots as criminal or irrational.’ (T.C.)

Black Celebration was made for the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Text: Morrissey, Martin L. Gore, Barbara Kruger, The Situationists International; Music: Skinny Puppy; Editor: Eleanor Goldsmith.

Tony Cokes makes video, installation, print, sound and other works that reframe appropriated texts to reflect upon capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge and pleasure. Cokes deploys sound as a crucial, intertextual element, complicating minimal visuals. He has shown works internationally at venues including Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, ZKM, REDCAT and La Cinémathèque Française. Cokes has screened at festivals including the Berlin Biennale X, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris/​Berlin/​Madrid and Oberhausen. Cokes is Professor in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence, RI. His work is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Post-Screening Discussion: Ephraim Asili in conversation with Mirna Belina.

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Following the screening of American Hunger (2013, 19 min) and Fluid Frontiers (2017, 23 min) Ephraim Asili discusses the films with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience.

In seven years, from 2011 to 2017, Ephraim Asili has completed a remarkable cycle of films called The Diaspora Suite about his relationship with the greater African diaspora. These films – Forged Ways, American Hunger, Many Thousands Gone, Kindah and Fluid Frontiers – document not only his travels across Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jamaica and the United States, but also a personal meditation on the constructs surrounding African-American cultural identity. With his observational 16mm cinematography and evocative use of sound and music, Asili is both critical and speculative, listening intently to the resonances of words and gestures that span centuries and oceans.

Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capital city of Ghana and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger (2013, 19 min) explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront American fantasies.

Fluid Frontiers (2017, 23 min) is the final film in the Diaspora Suite. Shot along the Detroit River, it explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press and artworks of local Detroit artists. All of the poems are read from original copies of Broadside Press publications by natives of the Detroit Windsor region, and were shot without rehearsal.

Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker, DJ and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His films have been screened at festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Whitney Museum. As a DJ, Asili can be heard live at his monthly dance party Botanica. He currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Post-Screening Discussion: Louis Henderson

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Following the screening of Bring breath to the death of rocks (2018, 34 min)(work in progress) Louis Henderson discusses the films with Mirna Belina.

‘I feel this force that draws me towards the invisible doorway, and it is like a fire burning in my stiffened limbs. So I must walk through the fields of snow… there, to where my resting place is already prepared.’ (Édouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint, 1961)

Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to the prison cell in the Jura mountains in which they were written, Bring breath to the death of rocks (2018, 34 min) proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. Many millions of years ago the Jura was a tropical ocean, as it metamorphosed into the mountain range it is today it left behind large sedimented layers of time, creating the strata that fold along the horizon line. If stratigraphy is the writing of strata, here we have a reading of this strata in which the fossilised history of Louverture can be brought to life through a geologic haunting. The film dramatises the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison (through the body of a young Haitian researcher) into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. Through historical détournement the past is revisited in order to imagine an alternative future, and in doing so the film offers what Glissant described in the introduction to his play Monsieur Toussaint as ​‘a prophetic vision of the past’. We hear an echo, a spiral retelling.

Featuring extracts of text from Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant (1959) and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) by Aimé Césaire. Actor: Jephthé Carmil, DOP: Diana Vidrascu, Editor: Louis Henderson, Producer: Olivier Marboeuf, Spectre Productions. Work in progress.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is trying to find new ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Interested in exploring the sonic space of images, his work aims to develop an archaeological method in cinema, listening to the echoes and spirals of the stratigraphic. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema. Henderson has shown his work at various film festivals, exhibitions and biennials worldwide. His work is in the public collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France, and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Rick Dolphijn – (The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

'The present… is what we are, and thereby, what already we are ceasing to be.' (Deleuze and Guattari)

In the first part of this talk, Rick Dolphijn will discuss the necropolitics of art. He will talk of the difficult relation that art has with the present and why the power of art is not ‘finite’ (not limited to any form of ‘extension’). Art shares this ‘infinity’ only with philosophy. This ‘infinity’ also shows that art does not run parallel to a human life, that it knows no beginning (birth) or end (death), but that it keeps on negotiating its relationship to the present. The second part of the talk claims that art therefore is, necessarily a philosophy of nature and that it envisions for us another world (which was always already there).

Rick Dolphijn is an associate professor based at Humanities, Utrecht University, with an interest in transdisciplinary research at large. He wrote Foodscapes, Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies with Iris van der Tuin (2012) and is finishing his new monograph The Cracks of the Contemporary; A Meditation on Art, Wounds and a Damaged Earth. He edited This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life with Rosi Braidotti (2014 – 5) and Philosophy after Nature (2017). Most recently he published and edited volume entitled Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary. At Sonic Acts Academy 2018, Dolphijn curated a conference block What, of Art, Belongs to the Present? with students and scholars from the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS). This year, he is joining Sonic Acts as an organiser of the large project including a seminar Exploring Death… and Ways to Live, close reading session Still Alive and Already Dead and a workshop A Necropolitics of Life (RMeS, February), with a final output at the Sonic Acts conference featuring lectures by Rosi Braidotti and Susanne M. Winterling.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Susanne M. Winterling – Gravitational Currents and The Life Magic – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In her conference talk, Susanne M. Winterling will show some of her recent works including Planetary Opera In Three Acts, Divided By The Currents (2018), a composition of sounds, natural and synthetic, documentary and imaginary. The composition includes hydrophone recordings of dinoflagellates, the sound of green turtles hatching, crabs rubbing their claws together and other ecological marvels. Enacted is a sensory inversion of the dominant anthropocentric dynamics that governs our sensual and political consciousness. What if we try to reverse the scale and focus, and deploy historical forms of media, usually associated with the internal human drama, to express the drama of the planet instead? Sensors of change and actors in climate change, the tiny protozoa in this imaginary aim to generate a new sense of interspecies alliance; a connection to blur the nature-culture division, the entangled social and ecological conflicts and actual structures reproducing violence. Let’s join the creatures that dwell within planetary space and through the currents.

Susanne M. Winterling was born and works in Rehau, Germany. Working across a variety of media including film, photography, sculpture and performance, Winterling is primarily known for her time-based installations which critically engage the representation of reality. Prevailing modernist concepts, power structures and hierarchical historiographies are captured and investigated in her work in the form of spatial constellations. With an emphasis on enhancing our perceptual and critical consciousness, Winterling undertakes affective and material-based research that highlights the subjective interaction between producers, viewers, materials and species in our ecology. Recent exhibitions include ICA Philadelphia, MIT List Center Boston, Contour Biennale, Empty Gallery HongKong, TBA21 Vienna, MoMa Dubrovnik, etc.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power? – Introduction by Rick Dolphijn

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The moderns have invented ‘nature’ and have made it one of their most important political institutions. Didier Debaise will revisit this very singular adventure through which a number of local inventions, gestures, and operations, namely within experimental systems, have given birth to a new political force. Disconnecting this nature from the very conditions of its emergence and existence, the moderns have instantiated it as an essential actor within the processes of normalisation of practices and as a crucial instrument justifying the extension of their impact on all other territories. Today the question then has become the following: How to resist the hegemonic tendencies of this modern version of nature in order to reinstate space and restore legitimacy to other ways of inhabiting the Earth.

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherché Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Centre of Philosophy at Free University of Brussels (ULB) where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with I. Stengers, of the Groupe d’études constructivistes (Geco). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and the French contemporary philosophy. He is director of a collection in Presses du réel, member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and Inflexions. He wrote three books on Whitehead’s philosophy, edited volumes on pragmatism, on the history of contemporary metaphysics, and he wrote numerous papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. Two of his books are translated in English: Nature as Event and A Speculative Empiricism. He is working on a new book called Pragmatique de la terre.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden.

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

'Research' as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated as well as away from recognised subjects whose validity is universally recognised. ‘Research’ models emanating from practice have ceased to be the context or the preparation for work and have become the main event of activity. These have had significant impact on so many arenas of knowledge production across the humanities and the social sciences and have countered the bordering and continents of knowledge towards platforms of shared subjectivity. ‘Research’ is now the arena in which we negotiate knowledge that we have inherited with the conditions of our lives. Those conditions, whether economic, geographical or propelled by subjectivity, have become the drive (not the subject matter) of the work. Through immersion in conditions, ‘research’ transforms from an investigative impulse to the constitution of new realities. It is thus that we recognise that ‘research’ is not some elevated activity requiring a great deal of prior knowledge, nor is it simply the urge to ‘find things out’. It is in many ways the stuff of daily life. The forms of current research have equally shifted, as contemporary, multivalent ‘research’ moves between archival, documentary, conceptual and performative modes, and utilises everything from fictioning, docu-dramatising to mimicry the queer animation of archives and structural self-instituting to produce new realities of knowledge.

Irit Rogoff is a writer, teacher, theorist and curator. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, a department she founded in 2002. Rogoff works at the meeting ground between contemporary practices, politics and philosophy. Her current work is on new practices of knowledge production and their impact on modes of research, under the title of Becoming Research (forthcoming). As part of the collective freethought, Rogoff was one of the artistic directors of The Bergen Assembly, 2016 and editor of The Infrastructural Condition published in its wake. Rogoff is also co-founder of The European Forum for Advanced Practices in 2017. Her publications include Looking Away – Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities (2013), Visual Cultures as Seriousness (2013) (with Gavin Butt), Unbounded: Limits’ Possibilities (2012), Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (2000).

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner – Universal Syntax – Introduction by Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou.

22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This talk will introduce a long-term collaborative project, Universal Syntax, by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner which seeks to untangle the human tendency to read the natural world as a text. The long and remarkably consistent history of the use of text as a metaphor for the interpretation of the natural world, present from ancient Babylonian observational practices, to Galileo’s reading of the solar system all the way to the human genome project, is ultimately the history of the human inability to experience the world unmediated. This is as much a history of media and technology as it is of science, culture and philosophy. As an entry point into the project, Litvintseva and Wagner will unpack some predominant theories of narrative structure and the metaphors they are based on, as a way to elaborate on alternative narrative models capable of responding to the complexities of contemporary perceptual realities.

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Videobrasil and Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, as well as solo presentations at Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Courtisane Film Festival, Ghent, among many others. She is a lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and is currently completing a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her academic writing has appeared in special issues of Environmental Humanities and Transformations journals, and numerous book volumes.

Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His research themes include the cyclical regeneration of media technologies, history of science, thresholds of human and nonhuman life, affective feedback, agricultural production and politics of waste. He has presented his work internationally, including at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin Atonal, Media Art Biennale WRO, Movimenta Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Eye Film Museum, Impakt Festival and Venice Biennale, among many others. His work has been featured in Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Flash Art and Die Zeit. Wagner graduated from Bard College in 2008. He was a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy and is currently a senior lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He is working with Sasha Litvintseva on a long-term collaborative project Universal Syntax.

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