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Every Time A Ear di Soun, a documenta 14 Radio Program, on air from April 8 to September 17, 2017

Every Time A Ear di Soun is a documenta 14 Radio Program in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk Kultur that explores sonority and auditory phenomena such as voice, sound, music, and speech as mediums for writing counterhegemonic histories. Every Time A Ear di Soun reflects on how the sonic impacts subjectivities and spaces, especially through the medium of radio.

For the duration of documenta 14, nine radio stations in Greece, Cameroon, Colombia, Lebanon, Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and Germany constitute a worldwide art exhibition on air. The radio program live streams on FM in Kassel, online from the documenta 14 website, and on shortwave around the world. The program punctuates each station’s usual programming in their local language with art pieces for radio commissioned by documenta 14, archival material, and broadcast selections from documenta 14’s Public Programs for four hours daily. Every Time A Ear di Soun is also accompanied by live acts addressing issues related to the phenomenology of the sonorous, the sonic as medium for historical narration, Frantz Fanon’s concept of radio as medium of resistance, Rudolf Arnheim’s concept of the imagery of the ear, and more.… More

The project, which draws its title from Mutabaruka’s dub poetry, takes its cue from the privileging of visual culture over auditory knowledge in most Western cultures. Greek philosophical thought in particular often reduces experience primarily to the visual, building its epistemology of historiography on the act of visual witnessing (autopsia) and considering the act of seeing as the principal source of knowing. In cultures with a so-called oral tradition, histories transmitted through narration freely assume the forms of both identifiable and nonidentifiable vocal utterances, speech, sound, and music. Here, sonority is fundamental and functions outside a visual and written logic, goes beyond it, and can neither be grasped by nor fully understood through it. When auditory experiences are shared, histories too are shared, and not only from mouth to ear: they are perceived by and encoded in the body through the physicality of sound waves and passed on from one generation to another. Because, as pointed out by Jean-Luc Nancy, if the visual is generally mimetic, the sonorous is tendentially methexic; that is, it has to do with participation, sharing, or contagion. It is this ability for auditory phenomena to instigate participatory moments and create spaces of exchange, and their ability to infect others, that makes the medium especially appropriate for transmitting histories beyond words. Every Time A Ear di Soun also explores the possibility of understanding orality and embodiment through auditory phenomena as a means of sharing knowledge and archiving memory in/on a moving, vulnerable body that exists in a specific time and space. The project deliberates on how sound creates and accommodates psychic and physical spaces, and how, through sound, a synchronicity emerges and reigns between bodies, places, spaces, and histories. At the same time, it attempts to give space to alternative narrations, as James Baldwin stated, not only “to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European notion of the world. For until this hour, when we speak of history, we are speaking only of how Europe saw—and sees—the world” (“Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption,” 1979).

In African and African diasporic cultures, Esiaba Irobi has written, the body “functions as a somatogenic instrument as well as a site of multiple discourses which absorbs and replays, like music recorded on vinyl, epistemologies of faith and power grooved into it by history” (“The Philosophy of the Sea: History, Economics and Reason in the Caribbean Basin,” 2006). The analogy of music on vinyl is in no way accidental, as the expression of any auditory phenomena gets encrypted not only in memory but also in the body; and through reiterations in performances of the “quotidian,” in dance and other rituals, the past is conveyed to the present and catapulted into the future. The transition and interconnections between vocal utterances, speeches, sounds, and music and performativity—and an embodied experience within space and place—is the curatorial node on which Every Time A Ear di Soun focuses.

While eight radio stations in the program are exist­ing structures, the German iteration is a new station in Berlin, starting from scratch—SAVVY Funk. For SAVVY Funk, artists invited by documenta 14 take over twen­ty-four hours of programming, including news, weather, and other sections such as Unpacking Sonic Migra­tions, Listen to the Other–disEmbodied Voices–Hybrid­ized Techno, Saout Africa(s), and Piratensender (Pirate station). Participating artists collaborate with students from the Class for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus University Weimar, directed by Professors Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch, to prepare and operate the radio program. Singer and her team are also contributing to a reading and listening room at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, where visitors can experience and reflect on radio in the making.

Every Time A Ear di Soun is a collaboration between documenta 14 and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Curator: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Co-curator: Marcus Gammel
Team: Tina Klatte, Maximilian Netter, Elena Agudio

Participating Stations

Paranoise Radio, Thessaloniki, and Cannibal Radio, Athens, Greece
April 8–27, 2017

Cannibal Radio is a web radio with the main intention of breaking the routine established by sponsored radio music. Paranoise is an independent, alternative web radio that focuses on the promotion of contemporary urban music and culture through interaction with listeners…

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Public Radio

Vokaribe Radio 89.6 FM
Barranquilla, Colombia
April 28–May 17, 2017

Vokaribe Radio is an urban community radio, based in marginalized neighborhoods of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast…

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Public Radio

RSI (Radio Sport Info) 92.3 FM
Douala, Cameroon
May 18–27, 2017
July 29–August 7, 2017

RSI (Radio Sport Info) “emotion reigns, information governs” is a thematic radio dedicated to sports, music, and culture. RSI is avant-garde radio featuring sports and cultural content…

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Public Radio

RURUradio
Jakarta, Indonesia
May 28–June 16, 2017

RURUradio is an online streaming radio run by artists and interdisciplinary creative professionals to discuss current issues faced by people in the city of Jakarta…

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Public Radio

SAVVY Funk
Berlin, Germany
June 17–July 8, 2017

Listening on demand: www.mixcloud.com/SAVVY_Funk/

Daily broadcasting program on: deutschlandfunkkultur.de/documenta-radio
Open Gallery and Radio Studio daily from 9 am–midnight: SAVVY Contemporary, Plantagenstrasse…

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Public Radio

Rádio MEC FM
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
July 9–28, 2017

Inaugurated in 1936 in Rio de Janeiro, Rádio MEC (Radio of the, now defunct, Ministry of Education and Culture) was the first station created in the country…

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Public Radio

WPFW 89.3 FM
Washington DC, USA
August 8–27, 2017

WPFW-FM Pacifica provides outlets for the creative skills and energies of the community, contributes to a lasting understanding between individuals of all nations, races, creeds, and colors, and promotes the full distribution of public information…

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Public Radio

Radio Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon
August 28–September 17, 2017

Radio Beirut is an online radio station and a physical live music venue in the heart of Beirut. Its main purpose is to serve as a authentic platform for music and culture in the region. This project is…

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Public Radio

Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Berlin, Germany
April 8–September 17, 2017

Radio as an exhibition space for acoustic art – that is the mission of Klangkunst, Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s weekly sound art program. Since 1998, it has commissioned and broadcast audio works by international artists – including more than 200 new productions to date…

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Public Radio

Participating Artists

AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), Leo Asemota, Gilles Aubry, Younes Baba-Ali, Serge Baghdassarians, Boris Baltschun, Rashad Becker, Gívan Belá, Ylva Bentancor, Caroline Bergvall, Nicholas Bussmann, Black Spirituals, Anna Bromley, Alessandro Bosetti, Halida Boughriet, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Maria Chavez, Michele Ciacciofera, Jace Clayton, Alvin Curran, Charles Curtis, Alberto De Campo, Anshuman Dasgupta, drog_A_tek (Paranormale, S.T.M.C, Elektroware, Voltnoi Brege & Quetempo), Theo Eshetu, Tim Etchells, Keir Fraser, Dani Gal, Christian Galarreta, Sanchayan Ghosh, Satch Hoyt, Mwangi Hutter, Islands Songs (Nicolas Perret & Silvia Ploner), Felix Kubin, Brandon LaBelle, Achim Lengerer, Robert Millis, Mobile Radio (Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington), Marco Montiel-Soto, Nástio Mosquito, Olaf Nicolai, Emeka Ogboh, Ahmet Öğüt, Aki Onda, Postcommodity, Anna Raimondo, Marina Rosenfeld, Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag, Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli & Kamran Sadeghi), Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nasan Tur, Hong-Kai Wang, James Webb, Jan St. Werner, Yan Jun, Samson Young

Commissions

Based on historical accounts by recording pioneers such as Theobald Noble and Fred Gaisberg—who made the earliest sound recordings in India around 1902—The Gramophone Effect by Aubry and Millis is…

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Backing track generally describes an unfinished piece of music, the production of which requires supplemental elements and the interplay of different components. A finalized recording of a piece of music…

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Based on a True Story is a cycle of works that seeks to generate scores from historical occurrences and processes that have had a significant impact on recent social history. Chapter IX employs recordings…

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The piece is based on audio recordings of the London Women’s March on January 21, 2017. Together with sound artist John Wynne, Caroline Bergvall arranged the recordings into a thirty-minute travelogue…

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A disordered world of sounds, a fantasy world based on sounds from places and situations recorded from all over the planet and then played as if these sounds were music. My purpose has been to excerpt…

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We ask the question: What are you listening for? The double-headed axe of the god Changó invokes ideas concerning the potential focus and purpose of listening. Black Spirituals feel compelled to explore…

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The sound piece is built around a time lapse (exile, immigration, generations, attachments, uninhabited territory) and put into perspective in relation to the present phenomenon known as “migrants.”…

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With increasing censorship in Turkey, the number of fortune-tellers and astrologers is on the rise. Astrologers and clairvoyants are enjoying a position of authority, warning their audience about bombs…

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The auditory space between a gunshot and whisper is brought into play through dissected records of sound effects from around the world, which were originally intended for radio playback in the 1960s. Between…

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The project underlines the mythical-symbolic value of the relationship between humankind and the sea that has defined geographical boundaries and forms of socialization in the Mediterranean. It presents…

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OMNIPRESENCE is a new choral work by Jace Clayton, written in response to harsh nighttime police lighting in his Harlem neighborhood. Understanding the bright lights as a manifestation of institutional…

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The Irrawaddy Blues is a minimal symphony of ambient sounds recorded in Myanmar in 2014/2015 and 2016. Travelling as a tourist with his wife from the northern lakes to Bagan and Mandalay, down the Irrawaddy…

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Our Musuem sets two independent streams of text/sound against each other. Conceived to be broadcast simultaneously over different radio frequencies and heard on multiple radios, or conjoined as a composite…

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Anshuman Dasgupta and Sanchayan Ghosh attempt to capture the dynamic relation between time and space via the human relationality of soundscapes, while invoking the history of shortwave radio and their…

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Will the next war be won in one decisive campaign, or will it be a long struggle of attrition? Should the Sonic Army primarily be offensive or defensive? Will the nature of battle be fluid or static? Will…

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This is the radio version of the soundtrack Theo Eshetu made with Keir Fraser for the video Atlas Fractured that is presented at documenta 14. With quotes from Carl Jung, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes…

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When we accept the necessities generated by technological progress and its commercialization, we reassert our mutant condition as urban beings. For example, we live surrounded by imperceptible electromagnetic…

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The sound piece What Touches Us Most brings together many of the vocal characters, soundscapes, and acoustic themes developed by Mwangi Hutter over the past two decades. Earlier sounds and characters speak…

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Marco Montiel-Soto explores and composes sounds that deal with relations between poetic and political territories, traditions, economy, religion, pyramids, spaceships, bingo, and death. He presents a sound…

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21/01/2011, ALBANIA, Tirana // 17/09/2012, ARGENTINA, Córdoba // 03/07/2007, AUSTRALIA, Anvil Hill // 15/02/2016, BELGIUM, Bruxelles // 07/02/2014, BOSNIA, Sarajevo // 17/06/2013, BRAZIL, Porto Alegre…

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“Igwe bu ike: (unity is strength), is one of the sayings which emerged in the experience chapter as hallmarks of Igbo philosophy of collaboration, its literary rendering is ‘there is strength in numbers’…

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New York-based artist and composer Aki Onda has channeled the spirit of the late Korean artist Nam June Paik via radio transmission. Paik is known for his association with shamanism, a practice that consistently…

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The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking is a long-form, 2-channel, hyper-directional opera projected via police/military Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) upon the ancient ruins of Aristotle’s Lyceum…

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a. Notation follows MIGRATION; b. No song without NOISE; c. DISUNISON follows unison; d. Duration = 47 minutes; e. whole note = VARIABLE; f. INTERVAL = perfect; a + b = transmission; a + f = [unknown].

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A Radio Opera for Violin, Contrabass Clarinet, Tuba, sonD-Double Bass, Percussion, Tape Recorder, Noise Generator, SM SW Transistor Radio, Radio Studio, Audion-Feedback-Radio-System, Human and Digital…

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Soundwalk Collective’s approach to composition combines anthropology, ethnography, nonlinear narrative, psychogeography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis. The source…

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00:00/42:48

For a long period of time, Nasan Tur has been focusing his research on the power of one of the most important political vehicles: speeches. Composition, structure, rhythm, emphasis—he explores how speeches…

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The Sugarcane Song is ascribed to helping mobilize what is arguably the first anti-colonial class-conscious agrarian uprising in recorded Taiwanese history, known as the Erlin Sugarcane Workers Revolt…

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A group of anonymous ear-witnesses recount their individual experiences of what happened on the night the voice on the radio announced the end of days. Was it a case of “fake news” or a glitch in reality…

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Multi-fragmented composition, 2017

Eight microtonally tuned feedback channels are broadcast over the documenta 14 Radio Program for a period of ten weeks. On July 6, 2017 the feedback channels converge…

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They are always part of a musician’s work: during live performances as well as in the playback ritual of everyday life. From Audiences is based on an ongoing research project about audiences conducted…

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The auditory range of bells defines territories, separating one community from another along cultural, religious, or ideological fault lines. Bells also connect individuals. When great care is taken in…

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