Crossings

How do vital forms, such as plant and water worlds, archive stories? What role do they play in political struggles and in reimagining society? How can those stories defy oblivion, alienation and objectification? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity and the damage of its ongoing extractivism, Crossings engages with the complex archival practices of remembering and grounding. Aiming at inhabiting archives collectively, intersubjectively and in enlivening ways, Crossings is a series of encounters that opens up permeable formats to life, civic engagement and diasporic memory – including political gardens, river stories, transatlantic spiritual routes and Afro-sonic transmigrations – in a boat journey, collective readings, social displays and food-sharing. Crossings is part of the Archive research stream (Re)memberings and (Re)groundings.

On this occasion the book Afro-Sonic Mapping. Tracing Aural Histories via Sonic Transmigrations by Satch Hoyt will be launched. From his longstanding engagement to “un-mute” colonial sound collections captured during the European colonial period, Satch Hoyt’s practice has been dedicated to intervene those collections and awake their sonicity, releasing phonogram recordings and instruments of different regions in Africa from the museological silence. For Hoyt, the sonic opens a portal to the acoustic mappings of history – testimonies of enslavement, resistance, empowerment and liberation, and also the amalgamations of today and the future. For the book launch, Satch Hoyt in collaboration with Dirk Leyers will perform live, intertwining historical and present recordings, vintage instruments and electronic music. By combining processed electric flute, electronic percussions, Congolese Sanzas, Brazilian Berimbau, synthesizers and recordings, Hoyt uncoveres layers of diasporic experience, reimagining memories of the African diaspora from contemporary and future spaces in which, as Hoyt stays in the book, “the recorded past becomes the present”.

Crossings is a collaboration between HKW and Archive Sites. It is part of the Archive research stream (Re)memberings and (Re)groundings.

With Malab Alneel, Leila Bencharnia, Zasha Colah, Gabriella Kolandra, Chiara Figone, Anselm Franke, Paz Guevara, Satch Hoyt, Suza Husse, Dirk Leyers, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Julia Mensch, Marcela Moraga, Auro Orso, Rebeca Pak

Curated by Chiara Figone and Paz Guevara