meLê yamomo: "...and when I speak, my brown skin and the entire ecology vibrate".
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Abstract Performance-Video-Lecture by meLê yamomoWhat lies in between theory and aesthetics? Situatedness and migration? Sounding and listening? Performing and perception? the Universal Self and the Colonial Other? What understandings transpire in imagining beyond social imaginations of racial, national, cultural, gender, or disciplinary borders and boundaries? What knowledges emerge through hearing? How can processes of soundings and listening transform us towards a postmigrant society? In this video performance lecture meLê yamomo resound their philosophy of sound and the sonus—migrating between continents, cultures, artistic practices, and academic disciplines.
“To explain how performative or sonic understandings are constructed and constituted, I unpack the entanglement of the medium, the body, and the sonus. I theorize sonus as the sound equivalent of the image. If the image is the relationship that transpires between a picture and a body, sonus is the relationship that our bodies have to sound. Through this idea, I analyze how collective ideologies or cultural imaginations ethnicities, race, gender, class, and articulations of identities and communities are understood and performed. How does the soni move from one sound to another? How might they migrate from one body to another. What does it mean for one body to perform another body as a medium? Does this remove the sonus from its embodied specificity. Can the agency of a community of bodies be taken away when its sonic media is appropriated by a different body? A different community?
As an academic born and raised in a former colonial context and who has been educated, now working, and receiving funding in Europe, writing about my postcolonial context, how have I not become the colonizer of my own culture? am I wearing the academic hat for the privilege it grants me as a postmigrant in the European metropolis? Is decoloniality an academic drag?”
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About meLê yamomomeLê yamomo is an Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality and author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 . He is the co-project leader and principal investigator of the European Joint Programming Initiative Cultural Heritage (JPICH) project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS). meLê is laureate of the »Veni Innovation Grant« (2017-2022) funded by the Dutch Research Organization (NWO) for the project »Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings« (2017-2022), and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardee by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstraße and in his works as scholar and artist, engages the topics of global and colonial histories of sound and performance, sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies. By the end of 2022, meLê yamomo became the fourth winner of the biennial composer's prize the OPEN OOR, awarded by the Trillende Lucht Foundation Amsterdam to 'composers whose music has a world of its own or whose world is clearly in the making.'
Website Livestream and on siteKlassische Musik, Jazz und Pop dominieren im westlichen Kulturkreis die Rezeption von Musik. Die Veranstaltungsreihe «Beyond Music – Quest for Home» bietet die Gelegenheit, sich mit der Tonkunst in alternativen Kontexten zu befassen. Performances lassen uns in andersartige Klangwelten eintauchen, Referate ermöglichen, das Erlebte zu verorten und zu reflektieren.