I have been working with Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe and Amos Gebhardt to curate Hi-Viz Practice Exchange 2021: Sound as Knowledge Exchange, an Chamber Made event presented in partnership with The Substation
Hi-Viz Practice Exchange is Chamber Made’s initiative aimed at deepening dialogue around cross-artform practice, placing a particular emphasis on minoritised genders, including people living beyond the binary and cis women, whose work resides at the intersection of performance, sound, and music. It functions as a day to foster dialogue, build networks, and nurture new understandings between performance makers, theatre directors, composers, and sound artists.
Sound as Knowledge Exchange: Curatorial Statement
Sound as Knowledge Exchange invites contemplation of sound as a relational medium operating across many registers and knowledge systems. Sound has a unique ontological ability to signal both presences and absences, in the large and small, of the past and present. It reflects the very contours of our world by shaping and being shaped by all phenomena from language, extinction, cultural meaning, storytelling, birth and ecologies.
Sound however is not heard equally. Our ability to know, connect and balance is impacted by dominant registers and perceptual hierarchies that habituate our sense of listening. This sensorial distortion can work at the intimate scale of the body, and echo out to a national, cultural and species level.
We are interested in individual and collective practices which disrupt the habitual, to ask how expanding an attunement to sound can generate cultures of change? Care and connectivity? Protest and survival?
Three key sessions addressing these ideas are Storytelling & Sensory Archive, Amplification & Entanglement and Collectivity & Attunement. Within these sessions, we invite a range of artists working at the nexus of sound, performance and music to reflect on how the sounds we choose to amplify impact who we are and how we share existence.
Image credits: Michele G Hunder, Sarah Walker, Thomas McCammon