Programme
Monday, 28/8
17:00-18:30 Welcome and introductions
17:00-17:30 Mediterranean (post)colonialisms
Elena Tzelepis, Dafni Tragaki, Petros Phokaides
17:30-18:00 Curating Mediterranean Sonic Archives
Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Elpida Karaba, Maria Paschalidou, Ioulia Pentazou
18:00-18:30 Participants’ research projects presentations
Christina Banalopoulou, Thanasis Karathanasis, Alexandra Mourgou, Susannah Kinghts
Break
19.00 Session 1
Martin Stokes | Hydraulic and hydropoetic frameworks in the Upper Euphrates
Coordinators/discussants: Oded Erez, Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Petros Phokaides
The upper Euphrates lies on the extreme margins of what could be considered the 'Mediterranean world', but its marginal status, on the edges of Ottoman, French and British imperial projects, make it useful to consider the complexities of postcolonial cultural politics across the broader region. The question of water, and its relation to culture, is another common link. This has a way though, here, of resuscitating Wittfogel's 'hydraulic hypothesis', long critiqued as orientalist and deterministic. We might, instead, think of processes of 'ruination' (Stoller) playing out simultaneously across landscape and across cultural fields, and an approach to poetry, song and ecology we might label 'hydropoetic'. Gilgamesh tells us 'the land was shattered like a pot' at the onset of the great Euphrates inundation, intended, by angry gods, to wipe out mankind. Three millennia later, those living in the vicinity of the Keban Dam, widely recognized as an ecological, economic and political disaster, feel they have a similar tale to tell. The presentation offers some preliminary thinking, then, about longue durée environment/poetry/song relations in the 'Eastern Mediterranean'.
Dinner
Tuesday, 29/8
10:30 Session 2
Martha Feldman | Memory Work and Folded Time in Greek Rebetiko Worlds of the 1970s
Coordinators/ discussants: Dafni Tragaki, Elena Tzelepis, Ioulia Pentazou
The principal meter hovering over Greek life of the 1970s was nine. The nine of the rebetiko revival that sounded on turntables, in nightclubs and whispered gatherings; the rolling nines that followed wailing taximi heard in tavernas and laundromats from old instrumentalists from Smyrna and Constantinople; the laïka tragoudia in 6/8 + 3/4. All these resounded even the airwaves were exploding with the slickly high-end, wildly popular LP Mikra Asia (1972), which reified the 1922 anniversary it marked, banalizing it with aspirational we-are-the-world sentiment just before the Polytechnic Uprising produced hard-line resistance (1973).
This session rethinks Junta-era temporal-political trajectories as deterritorialized and itinerant (Deleuze), errant (Glissant), and “queer” (Freeman). How might auditory imaginations join with memory work in epistemologies that re-member through folded, layered forms of time? How might “nine” figure not just zeibekiko but sound-worlds that move differentially and recursively between bodies yearning for liberation, dancing into oblivion, or resisting the roar of gunfire and tanks.
Break
18:30 Session 3
Peter McMurray | Decolonizing Sound Studies, Libya 1911?
Coordinators / discussants: Mitsos Bilalis, Elpida Karaba, Maria Paschalidou
In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. The resulting Italo-Turkish War (1911-12) is often described as a turning point in the sensory modernity of warfare, with loud noises, the use of airplanes, and so on. I explore here two such sensory aspects of this war with particular relevance to sound studies: first, the journalistic dispatches of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, part of a cluster of early Futurist writings that are often pointed to as a key moment in sonic modernity; and second, experiments carried out by the Italians on early radio (wireless telegraphy) during war. In contrast, Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces cultivated their own sonic techniques of anticolonial resistance. This conflict thus offers an important opportunity to think explicitly about the possibilities and necessities of decolonizing sound studies as a discipline.
Dinner
Wednesday, 30/8
10:00-11:30 Artistic workshop | Curating Mediterranean sonic archives
Coordinators: Elpida Karaba, Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Maria Paschalidou, Ioulia Pentazou, Dafni Tragaki.
The artistic workshop designed as a participatory cross-artistic/scholarly regime regulating the production of a sonic/multimedia project in dialogue with the theoretical workshop. At the end of each theoretical session participants are welcome to submit digital material inspired by the presentation: songs, concepts, lyrics, poetry, photos, film and literature excerpts, radio sounds, noises, phrases, artworks or else. All material will be gathered in three digital repositories each corresponding to a separate section. This collectively accumulated, raw material will serve the composition of empathetic, performative archives reflectively mediating, re-distributing and re-narrating in multimedia modalities diverse knowledge assemblages produced across the theoretical sessions. The workshop is intended to present the material, in order to motivate discussions about their potential appropriation in artistic projects.
11:45-12:15 Closing remarks
17:00-18:30 Welcome and introductions
17:00-17:30 Mediterranean (post)colonialisms
Elena Tzelepis, Dafni Tragaki, Petros Phokaides
17:30-18:00 Curating Mediterranean Sonic Archives
Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Elpida Karaba, Maria Paschalidou, Ioulia Pentazou
18:00-18:30 Participants’ research projects presentations
Christina Banalopoulou, Thanasis Karathanasis, Alexandra Mourgou, Susannah Kinghts
Break
19.00 Session 1
Martin Stokes | Hydraulic and hydropoetic frameworks in the Upper Euphrates
Coordinators/discussants: Oded Erez, Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Petros Phokaides
The upper Euphrates lies on the extreme margins of what could be considered the 'Mediterranean world', but its marginal status, on the edges of Ottoman, French and British imperial projects, make it useful to consider the complexities of postcolonial cultural politics across the broader region. The question of water, and its relation to culture, is another common link. This has a way though, here, of resuscitating Wittfogel's 'hydraulic hypothesis', long critiqued as orientalist and deterministic. We might, instead, think of processes of 'ruination' (Stoller) playing out simultaneously across landscape and across cultural fields, and an approach to poetry, song and ecology we might label 'hydropoetic'. Gilgamesh tells us 'the land was shattered like a pot' at the onset of the great Euphrates inundation, intended, by angry gods, to wipe out mankind. Three millennia later, those living in the vicinity of the Keban Dam, widely recognized as an ecological, economic and political disaster, feel they have a similar tale to tell. The presentation offers some preliminary thinking, then, about longue durée environment/poetry/song relations in the 'Eastern Mediterranean'.
Dinner
Tuesday, 29/8
10:30 Session 2
Martha Feldman | Memory Work and Folded Time in Greek Rebetiko Worlds of the 1970s
Coordinators/ discussants: Dafni Tragaki, Elena Tzelepis, Ioulia Pentazou
The principal meter hovering over Greek life of the 1970s was nine. The nine of the rebetiko revival that sounded on turntables, in nightclubs and whispered gatherings; the rolling nines that followed wailing taximi heard in tavernas and laundromats from old instrumentalists from Smyrna and Constantinople; the laïka tragoudia in 6/8 + 3/4. All these resounded even the airwaves were exploding with the slickly high-end, wildly popular LP Mikra Asia (1972), which reified the 1922 anniversary it marked, banalizing it with aspirational we-are-the-world sentiment just before the Polytechnic Uprising produced hard-line resistance (1973).
This session rethinks Junta-era temporal-political trajectories as deterritorialized and itinerant (Deleuze), errant (Glissant), and “queer” (Freeman). How might auditory imaginations join with memory work in epistemologies that re-member through folded, layered forms of time? How might “nine” figure not just zeibekiko but sound-worlds that move differentially and recursively between bodies yearning for liberation, dancing into oblivion, or resisting the roar of gunfire and tanks.
Break
18:30 Session 3
Peter McMurray | Decolonizing Sound Studies, Libya 1911?
Coordinators / discussants: Mitsos Bilalis, Elpida Karaba, Maria Paschalidou
In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. The resulting Italo-Turkish War (1911-12) is often described as a turning point in the sensory modernity of warfare, with loud noises, the use of airplanes, and so on. I explore here two such sensory aspects of this war with particular relevance to sound studies: first, the journalistic dispatches of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, part of a cluster of early Futurist writings that are often pointed to as a key moment in sonic modernity; and second, experiments carried out by the Italians on early radio (wireless telegraphy) during war. In contrast, Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces cultivated their own sonic techniques of anticolonial resistance. This conflict thus offers an important opportunity to think explicitly about the possibilities and necessities of decolonizing sound studies as a discipline.
Dinner
Wednesday, 30/8
10:00-11:30 Artistic workshop | Curating Mediterranean sonic archives
Coordinators: Elpida Karaba, Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Maria Paschalidou, Ioulia Pentazou, Dafni Tragaki.
The artistic workshop designed as a participatory cross-artistic/scholarly regime regulating the production of a sonic/multimedia project in dialogue with the theoretical workshop. At the end of each theoretical session participants are welcome to submit digital material inspired by the presentation: songs, concepts, lyrics, poetry, photos, film and literature excerpts, radio sounds, noises, phrases, artworks or else. All material will be gathered in three digital repositories each corresponding to a separate section. This collectively accumulated, raw material will serve the composition of empathetic, performative archives reflectively mediating, re-distributing and re-narrating in multimedia modalities diverse knowledge assemblages produced across the theoretical sessions. The workshop is intended to present the material, in order to motivate discussions about their potential appropriation in artistic projects.
11:45-12:15 Closing remarks