Audiowalk Series
O som intangível do contato – Blumenau (in portuguese)
Intangible Sound of Contact – Istanbul (in english)
Workshop Series
1. January 2023 at the Terra Indígena ibirama-Laklãnõ. Juventude Xokleng, Instituto Now and me joined in a day full of exchanges. This workshop happened in the scope of Juventude Xokleng´s podcast production Caminho do Sol (Sun Path), facilitated by @institutonow.
2. April 2023: in collaboration with Ariramba Cultural and run by @joaovoiaa, jornalist from @juventudexokleng. Samara Vatxug Camlem and Koziklã Sanara Rodrigues got together for a Creative Writing workshop. The resulting texts can be heard in the audiowalk in Blumenau (link above).
Performances
For me as an artist, to have been in touch with this less known history was a turning point. In a series of performances, I understand myself as a person-in-sound, a being-in-voice, with two ears and multiple mouths, from where the influence of multiple cultures speak out. As an outcome of this search for a new artistic perspective, I express myself in site specific performances wearing a loudspeaker-costume (built in collaboration with Lisa Simpson and Albert Amerioun).
10.09.23 – Performance at the Orangerie Schloß Charlottenburg Berlin
16.09.23 – Performance at the Tarabya Cultural Academy Summerfestival
05.11.23 – Performance during the Artist Residency at Sonoscopia (PT)
06.10.24 – Performance in the scope of ANIMA MUNDI in Luckau (DE)
The Project
In a series of audiowalks, performances and scored meetings, Intangible Sound of Contact proposes an investigation based in three axes:
1. Written history becomes oral
2. Transporting oral traditions with sound
3. Encounters become audible.
Intangible Sound of Contact is a project using sound as the tool to investigate the contact between different cultures. Understanding the word culture in a broader, from micro to macro-sociological extended sense, the artist poses questions as: What is the sound of culture contact? How to transport ancient cosmoauditions with sound? How can this knowledge influence us today? Is there a post-colonial way of listening? How does ist sound?
Intangible Sound of Contact reflects on the history of the early 20th century, the time of the so-called neo-colonialism, of flourishing industry and the run for energy sources. Starting from the foundation of the German colony Blumenau in Brazil in 1850 (Laura Mello’s hometown), the artist draws a line leading up to the present day and raises questions about the consequences of racial supremacism and dichotomies such as wildness vs. civilization.
Participants
Brazil (MEET THE AUTHORS)
@juventudexokleng – AJIX – Juventude Indígena Xokleng
@vatxug_camlem (text, voice) – Samara Vatxug Camlem
@joaovoiaa (text, voice) – Koziklã Sanara Rodrigues
@sanara_skz (text, voice) – João Voia
@christianedemacedo (voice) – Christiane de Macedo
@jaguatirika_pintora (graphic art) – Juliana Gomes
@ariramba_cultural (production) – Vanessa Medeiros
Friendly support: @Institutonow, Laboratório de Mídia UFPR
Turkey
@petra_nachtmanova (research, bağlama and voice)
@bangevaz (bağlama and voice)
Aaron Snyder (voice)
Zach Hart (voice)
For more information see @intangible_sound_of_contact
Supported by:
Acknowledgments: Çiğdem İksilik, Lena Alpozan, Pia Entenmann, Sinem Tekel, Jutta and Hans-Joachim Blumenau-Niesel, Cathrin Hermann, Klaus Wolf, Rahel Aschwanden, Flora Holderbaum, Wolfgang Musil.
It all started…
with a Scholarship from the Tarabya Cultural Academy in 2021. As a brazilian from Blumenau living in Germany, it was my first time in Istanbul. I couldn´t imagine that there would be such a connection between my own past and this place in Tarabya. After discovering Pedro Blumenau´s grave in the German War Cemetery in Tarabya, a long process started, and since then it has been two years of readings and archive research.
But who was Pedro Hermann Blumenau? Blumenau is a city in South Brazil, founded by the german pharmacist and businessman Hermann Bruno Otto Blumenau, born 1819, the father of Pedro Hermann Blumenau, who was born 1868 and died 1917 after his activities for the „Expedition Klein“ in Anatolia.
The history of the Blumenau family reveals itself as an example of how Europe handled in the early 20th century. Both father and son´s path, described in books and archive documents, resemble a model created by European nations for themselves and for the whole world. David Graeber and David Wengrow describe this „standard model of the history of civilization“ as using „evolutionary logic to describe a linear development of mankind from simple and original to increasingly complex forms of society, from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to pastoralism and agriculture to capitalist developments. In this standard model, the indigenous societies are assigned to a pre-civilizational state of nature. This model was continued in the „scientific“ racism theories of the 19th century, whose forms of thought shape the discourses to this day.“(Graeber/Wengrow 2022)
Reading about Pedro Hermann´s childhood in Blumenau, his studies of Mining Engineering in Braunschweig and his later jobs as „Mine Director“ in Mexico and later in the Ottoman Empire, I came across different groups of people who lived in the same regions where he has worked, but whose existence have been under an erasing process since at least 500 years. I was schocked, not only to learn about the violences suffered by Laklãnõ-Xokleng indigenous in South Brazil, but also because, being born and having lived 17 years in Blumenau, this was the first time I have heard about them. Not a single sentence was written in school books of the 1970´s and 1980´s, when I was attending school in Blumenau.
On the Anatolian side, the complex history of murder and opression of armenian, jesidian and curdish cultures is all interwoven with territorial disputes and the source for natural resources, undertaken by the European countries.
