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SOUTHERN CLAIRAUDIENCE — SOME SOUND DOCUMENTS FOR A FUTURE ACTHONG-KAI WANG & LAPTOPRADIO
(TWN / CH)
Sound, Performance, Radio, history, decolonial perspectives, collaborative practices
The Sugarcane Song is ascribed to helping mobilize what is arguably the first anti-colonial, class-conscious agrarian uprising in recorded Taiwanese history: The Erlin Sugarcane Workers Revolt. Written by the Sugarcane Workers Union under Japan’s colonial rule in 1925, it had since receded into oblivion until 2001, when a group of historians rediscovered the song as a corollary to unearthing evidence of the Revolt itself. Southern Clairaudience - some sound documents for a future act proposes a dissonant reading of the excavated song. It reimagines the long-lost melody with a group of sugarcane planters near the township of Erlin as its geopolitical point of departure, then seeks collaborators and audiences across (il)legible borders to respond by concocting various performative situations. These convocations put forward the question: is it possible to create a variety of second chance(s) for hearing a network of missing affiliations and histories via song making? The audience is called upon to hear and listen to a speculative constellation of improvised sound documents generated for a future archive in process.
During the festival, Southern Clairaudience will be presented after a three days collaborative workshop with HEAD students of MFA Work.Master that will occur one week before.
Taiwan-born Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. The process of Wang’s research-based practice is informed by the unceasing tension between languages, ideologies, identities and knowledge regimes. It is situated at the intersection of aesthetic, discursive and pedagogical production, often concerned with politics of missing knowledges resulted by encounters between histories, lived experiences, powers and bodies. Through organizing modes of listening, collaborative sociality, and alterior bodily interpretations, her work seeks to forge unlikely affiliation and time-space of the transformative beyond received chronologies and geographies. Wang has presented her work internationally, at Documenta 14, Taipei Biennial, Kunsthall Trondheim, Museum of Modern Art New York, among others.
LapTopRadio is a nomadic and auto-organised web-radio, flitting about and broadcasting irregularly on the internet since 1998 with a most simple setting: a laptop with a modem connected to the mobile-phone network or over wifi if there is a signal. With this experimental structure the aim is to explore the possibilities of radio networking and streaming, which seek to counter or supplement forms of public broad- and nearcasting through creating unique forms of collectivity.