presentation, performance, storying

Wednesday, January 25 / 19:30

Errant Bodies studio
Cotheniusstrasse 6
10407 Berlin

Bárbara Lázara / Sharing and discussing her artistic practice and approach

The latent realm underneath words. In this talk I will unfold some aspects of my vocal work and research dedicated to track and amplify subjugated languages, archives of the body and stolen memories. 

Bárbara Lázara is an artist, vocalist, and researcher devoted to making space for technologies that have been betrayed and abandoned by Western thought. She researches with her voice and senses knowledge embedded in ancestral memory. Describing her body as an archaeological ruin and the Spanish language as a Catholic church built on its top, she asks her buried remains how they want to speak. Sound emerges and reflects back in different ways, depending on the space she finds herself in. Her interest in echolocation began when she was working in Berlin and a friend invited her to perform in an abandoned hospital. She was struck with the way the space talked back at her, as each material had a different response to the same sound. This experience amplified interests of vulnerability in performance, and she slowly stripped her work away from gadgets. Eventually, it ended up being her voice, sometimes performing along with others, and finding ways to create effects found in sound editing devices only with the architecture. Bárbara Lázara is DAAD sound and music fellow 2022/23.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay / Presenting his recent publication, Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues (London: Palgrave Macmillan)

This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global Souths, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.  The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-extractive-consumptive cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties. 

Web: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an Indian-born media artist, researcher, and writer, with a PhD in artistic research and sound studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Chattopadhyay is a professor at Critical Media Lab, Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.