Son[i]a #314
AM Kanngieser
![Son[i]a #314](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/file-20181019-105748-11n8jxi_0.jpeg)
Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to them tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice.
AM Kanngieser’s work involves a close, critical, uncomfortable, political listening in which they both explore sound governance and seek to creatively amplify indigenous struggles for social justice in times of climate change. In doing so, they do not for a moment lose sight of the complexities and contradictions inherent in carrying out field work in the context of white academia, no matter how much anti-colonial theory and how many good intentions go into a project.
Listening, affects, orality permission, recompense, exchange, recording, silences, pauses, natural disasters, and an awareness of when it’s time to leave, are thus key tools in their field research. These prerequisites challenge the protocols and formalities of academic work and resist encapsulation in its language. Anja Kanngieser draws on many strategies to resolve these tensions: from a personal and compulsive archive of field recordings and orality, to documentary essays, sound walks, sound maps, sonification, radio pieces, lectures, workshops, podcasting manuals, and academic literature, always attuned to any possible cracks in the academic corset.
In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.
Sounds from AM Kanngieser's archive. This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Produced in collaboration with Sonic Acts.
M Murphy
Murphy works with and against technoscience in the areas of environmental justice and data politics, colonialism, sexuality, reproduction and race. Their approach is interdisciplinary not only in the sense of involving various areas of knowledge, but also in enacting their dual responsibility: the almost impossible task of dismantling extractive racial capitalism, by means of re-imagining radical Black, queer, Indigenous and feminist decolonial horizons and worlds of care. In this podcast, Murphy walks us through permission-to-pollute infrastructures in and around Chemical Valley in the Great Lakes area, the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet.
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #29, curated by Chris Cutler.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser that we were unable to include the first time around.
Sounds in Cause
A selection of field recordings from environments that are currently in the midst of a process of irreversible change.
Aura Cumes
Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores into the contemporary politics of listening and the role of the voice in law.