Pagtatahip - Windsichten. Eine neue Klanginstallation von meLê yamomo

The artist and composer meLê yamomo draws on a constellation of sonic sources. Archival recordings - of a Malayan soldier in a German World War I camp expressing his loss in captivity; of indigenous Kalinga soundscapes captured by European composers of the early 20th century amidst the aesthetic fervor of musical Orientalism; of a Filipino library. The sounds of indigenous Kalinga soundscapes captured by early 20th century European composers amidst the aesthetic fervor of musical Orientalism; of a Filipino librarian in 1920s Berlin reciting anti-colonial poetry; and of a Javanese dancer on tour in Europe singing the Panji epics - resound as living traces of exile from the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv and Lautarchiv.

These ghostly voices mingle with contemporary field recordings of meLê and his brother Jay - lullabies, intimate murmurs between father and son and echoes from a Southeast Asian village that was once home. Together, they form a web of uprootedness and return, in which the sonic remnants of colonial encounters intertwine with family memories and invite us to listen across an entire century.

The title Pagtatahip - a Tagalog word for the traditional way of threshing rice - offers a guiding metaphor. To sift means to separate, but also to circulate: To allow stories to rise up, disperse and condense anew. This becomes both the conceptual and compositional ethos of the piece.

Concept and composition: meLê yamomo

Spatial sound design: Nico Daleman

Curation and dramaturgy: Jay Yamomo

PARTICIPANTS

meLê yamomo has lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick and Munich and currently lives between Amsterdam and Berlin. He is Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, member of the Amsterdam Young Academy and author of Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is project leader and principal investigator of the EU-JPICH project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS) and the Sonic Entanglements project of the Netherlands Research Council. meLê is the fourth winner of the Open Ear Award, the most prestigious composer prize in the Netherlands, and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardees of the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstraße, where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus and Forces of Overtones are part of the repertoire. meLê curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts/produces the podcast Sonic Entanglements. In his work as an artist and researcher, meLê explores the themes of sound migration, queer aesthetics and post/decolonial acoustemologies.

- Location: Listening room, 2nd floor

- free of charge

- Languages: German / English

- Wheelchair accessible