ISBN: 978-0-9827439-7-3
11,4 x 17,8 cm (softcover)
104 pages
Published: November 2012
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BRANDON LABELLE is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality. Since 2011 he works as Professor at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.
Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian
by Brandon LaBelle
"What if recent revolutionary events, such as Occupy or the Arab uprising, function as sonic wave – collective voicings –that resonate globally and that call our bodies toward a new way of turning, or tuning? Brandon LaBelle’s Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is an extraordinary performance in listening; it traces how these distant and near vibrations enact, in our body, the drama of the political, such that our ability to feel, to love, to speak, to hope, and to connect with others is re-imagined, renewed, returned." — Christian Hawkey
The ongoing protest movements spanning the globe seek to challenge, revitalize and rethink political processes as well as demand economic justice. Forming into a dispersed and poignant network of struggles, the current situation reveals a global culture of hope, angst and imagination. Author and artist Brandon LaBelle has sought to engage these events by way of a diary of affiliation and reciprocation in which personal memories and cultural reflections search for remote connection, in particular, with the Arab Spring. His Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is marked by an urgency to unsettle divides, both imaginary and physical, between west and east, Anglo and Arab, and to put into question narratives of the political. Written between February and June of 2011, the Diary functioned as a daily consideration of the intensity of events erupting around the world structurally linked to personal thoughts and memories. This five-month period acts as a platform from which questions around US imperialism, art and revolution, the task of writing, and the possibility of new political subjectivity are raised. LaBelle asks for an "agency of the intimate", outlining a tender map of the transnational.
