Music Pours Over The Sense:
Experimenting with relationships between body and sound as a transformative practice

Online Symposium
15th and 16th of May 2020

↓ video archive below!

With our bodies unable to touch, our eyes unable to meet and our ears deafened by an overload of content, we must listen even more carefully, reassure silence even more deeply, voice even more viscerally and experiment even more with how we relate to.

“Music Pours Over The Sense” is a two-day online gathering around the transformative, connective and affective potential pouring from dialogues between bodies and sounds. It brings together researchers, practitioners, artists, activists and organisers from corporeal-acoustic spheres in a conversation around body-sound relationships, their potentialities and the impact the current pandemic and political crisis are having on them. 

Originally planned as a live event on the premises of Forum Stadtpark in Graz but interrupted by the pandemic, “Music Pours Over The Sense” morphs into a series of online conversations and publications open to everyone the Internet may connect. Despite the current personal, global and cybernetic overload, we have decided not to cancel the symposium, but to shape it into an extended digital conversation. Pondering ways of relating and resonating with an environment and with each other as collective artistic practice seems currently of great importance.

This conversation will take place through four discussion panels triggered by the muting and deafening dangers of self-confinement and through lectures, essays, practices, etcetera published on this website.

VIDEO ARCHIVE

FRIDAY, 15th May

10AM CET
“Aesthetic Cognition: Steps to an Ecology of Cognitive Practices” - lecture by Alex Arteaga (ESP/DE)

The possibility to conceive and perform aesthetic practices as a specific and autonomous variety of research relies, fundamentally, on a clear definition of the specific intentional relationship between these practices and the object of research. The question to be answered here is this: What is the goal of aesthetic research practices? And more precisely: What do they intend to achieve in relation to the researched issue? The concept of “aesthetic cognition” that I am developing aims at addressing this question in the framework of the embodied and situated cognition and thus beyond epistemology and the idea of knowledge production.

3PM CET
Panel 1 “Voice in times of pandemics - Voices in suffocation can also listen in disobedience” 
with Veza Maria Fernandez Wenger (ESP/AT), Jule Flierl (DE), Edyta Jarząb (PL)

Voice has a long history of being muted, surveilled and undermined as regressive, feminine and animal. Nevertheless, the voice is complex, powerful and sensitive. It operates beyond genders and species, following principles of relation, intensity and affect, challenging binaries and the merely silent abstract thought. The voice gathered and dealt with suffocation, hyperconnectivity and oversaturated internet already before the confinement.  How does the voice deal with its suffocation during the present pandemic crisis? How can the voice be unmuted? Should it remain silent? How can it be amplified? How does the voice relate to the environment, the Internet and other voices in this confinement time? Three dance, performance and theatre artists, researchers and activists discuss the dissident and the corporeal voice through their practices.

7pm CET

Panel 2 “Improvisation as an alternative academy crucial to preparing ourselves for... the struggle to keep sorrow from degenerating into despair“
with Magdalena Chowaniec (PL/AT), Keith Hennessy (US), Andrea Parkins (US/DE), Simon Rose (UK/DE). Panel will end with a video contribution by Dorine Mokha (RDC)

With spaces, relations, patterns and structures disrupted by the current situation, a big part of the world’s population is forced, at least partially, to improvise their lives at the moment. 

The pandemic as a crack within the apparent stability, highlights the differences between what we conceive of as individual and collective normalities. When reminded of the world’s fragility again, how do we choose to face the uncertainty? Four artists - researchers in dance and music and cultural activists privileged enough to search for some answers within their own improvisation experience, discuss the potential of improvisation as a tool for re-organization, as a practice of courage, as a relational mode of becoming and as what becomes of it in times of spatial rupture within the artistic and socio-political microcosms.

At the end we will present the reflections on improvisation from a perspective of an artist and of a citizen, pre-recorded on video and sent to us by Dorine Mokha - a Congolese choreographer. He will not be able to participate live in the panel because of the frequent power outages and very unstable internet connection in RDC.

00.00CET
“Aesthetic Cognition: Steps to an Ecology of Cognitive Practices” - lecture by Alex Arteaga (ESP/DE) - see description above




SATURDAY, 16th May – Live Stream

11am CET
Panel 3 “Holding onto meetings and gatherings under prohibition? Subversive strategies of collective dancing and music making”
with Bogomir Doringer (SRB/NL), Naja Orashvili (GEO), Magdelena Ho Yan Tang (HK), Jamila Johnson-Small (UK)

Bodies moving to music, alternatively gathering to celebrate, bodies training, dancing or singing could not be stopped by the isolation measures imposed on us by this pandemic. 

But the separation leaves us devoid of the power carried by the physical collective presence re-constituting our sense of self and of a community. What becomes of the club, theatre and protest culture in the months to come, when commonly shared vibrations, energies, liveliness, attunement - qualities that cannot be pressed into a series of two-dimensional visual signs, go missing? How can we keep on subverting the ways we gather in sound and dance, taking into consideration the care for not spreading a virus? Through the lense of subversive and ecstatic gathering practices such as choreographies, parties, choirs, movements and riots, let us rethink the values of the public, the private, the underground, the institutional, the legal and illegal and of what’s collectively shared beyond words.

3pm CET
Panel 4 “Researching through artistic practices: our responsibility for social transformation” moderated by Alex Arteaga (ESP/DE)

 Every kind of research could be oriented towards transforming society for the better—whatever this means for each of us. Therefore, every researcher has a social responsibility. Based on these two hypotheses, this panel addresses the following questions: How specifically does artistic research, understood here as research through artistic practice, contribute to social transformation? How do we conceive and perform our artistic research practices in order to fulfill our social function? How do the outcomes of our research—however each of us understands this term—enable social transformation? How do we realize our responsibility as artist researchers?

To participate in this panel, please register under symposiumfskwds@gmail.com

We will grant 15 places max.- first come first serve

6pm CET
„Listening through the Noise“ – a live practice of somatic listening 
by Paula Montecinos (CHL) - https://sounddingbuddies.radio12345.com