Mediterranean (post)colonialisms
The theoretical workshop seeks to rethink the “Mediterranean” as a relational and elusive musical place emerging through its multiple, unfinished trajectories and temporalities, as well as a multivalent discursive/sonic field for a radical critique of modernity activating contingencies for unlearning history. Drawing upon paradigms from the Mediterranean “East”, it is motivated by the reconsideration of the Mediterranean less in terms of a fixed, spatial category and more as a musical idea: to re-imagine and listen to the Mediterranean as an unruly, incomplete archive of sounds and as a “boundless sea” of genres and voices to be performed, of sonic odysseys to be (re-)mapped, of connectivities and disconnections to be (re-)appraised. Inevitably, such sensibilities of the “Mediterranean” urge for alternative, situated performativities of its knowledge subverting imperial epistemological and cultural logics casting their shadows over the present. This postcolonial adventure of knowledge is interested in probing wider and comparative vistas questioning normative imaginaries and critically re-scaling audibilities of the Mediterranean, its ruins, noises, rhythms and silences. It presupposes the retraining of our historiographic/artistic/ethnographic ear and a way of listening to the (Eastern) “Mediterranean” floating laboratory of history also as a challenge for a postcolonial epistemological re-positioning: of reflexively making sense of the ways our scholarly selves are variously entangled within the coloniality of knowledge and its imperialist orthodoxies and agendas. Such a postcolonial listening to the ceaselessly becoming world of the Mediterranean archive can set the stage for re-routing our auditory imagination contingently texturing and expanding our intelligibilities of the political, while taking the responsibility for what remains unheard and what it means to know it.
The artistic workshop is 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.
The artistic workshop is 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.