PROF. DR. BONAVENTURE NDIKUNG with MANUELA GARCÍA ALDANA

7 Block Sessions

16.10.24

20.11.24

18.12.24

08.01.25

22.01.25

29.01.25

12.02.25

SPACE, PLACE AND THE SONIC TANGENT:

ON CROSSING RHYTHMS, SACRAL SONIC SPACES & GROOVING FORWARD

The beat

Has a rich and magnificent history

Full of adventure

Excitement

And mystery

Some of it bitter and some of it sweet

But all of it part of the beat

The beat! The beat!

They say

It began

With a chant and a hum

And a black hand laid on a native drum……

Bantu, Zulu, Watusi, Ashanti, Herero, Igbo, Asuto, Iasa, Inkanga, Budunga, .Kikiyu, Bawutu, Kisi,

(…)

(Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln: All Africa)

The seminar “Space, Place and the Sonic Tangent: On crossing rhythms, sacral sonic spaces & grooving forward” will explore spatiality, spatial politics, place- and space-making in relation to sonority and auditory phenomena, such as voice, speech, sound and music at large. Sonic manifestations and music are investigated here as mediums through which mappings can be made, as sites of construction of cartographies, as well as mediums through which histories are conveyed. In this seminar, we will put a spotlight on music as a context and concept for Spatial Strategies, but we will also venture beyond that which is heard into how and where sound is heard or perceived. In so doing we hope to establish parameters of understanding geographical and political spaces through music while also establishing ways of writing counter-hegemonic histories through the sonic.

This seminar also aims at exploring the embodiment of sound – the body as a space in which spatial strategies are enacted f.e. through dancing, and physical space as a body in which music is made and resounded. Sound creates and accommodates psychic and physical spaces, and through sound (not as causality, but as bond), a synchronicity (and even asynchronicity) emerges and reigns between bodies, places, spaces, and histories. This is at the crux of the seminar “Space, Place and the Sonic Tangent: On crossing rhythms, sacral sonic spaces & grooving forward”.

In cultures with a so-called oral tradition, histories transmitted through narration freely assume the forms of identifiable or non-identifiable vocal utterances, speech, sound and music, incl. instrumentation. In this multiplicity of forms of expression, the many layers of the platforms/ spaces carry various energies and histories into the world. When Babatunde Olatunji talked about the evocative power of the trinity in drums, namely the spirit of the tree that gives the drum's frame, the skin of the animal plus the spirit of the drummer, he basically described the material and spiritual layers that come together to produce a space, and thereby a sophisticated auditory phenomenon.

The seminar “Space, Place and the Sonic Tangent: On crossing rhythms, sacral sonic spaces & grooving forward” posits that when vocal utterances, speeches, sounds and music are produced and shared, spaces are created, shaped, reconstructed, while histories too are shared, not only from mouth to ear, but completely perceived by and encoded in the body and space through the physicality of sound waves, and passed on from one generation to the other.

This possibility of the embodiment of music as a means of sharing knowledge and archiving memory in/on a moving and vulnerable body and spaces that exist within a specific time and spatial context are crucial for this seminar.

Sonority is the “groove of temporality” that makes the epistemological basis of the visual and written historicality vibrate. Sonority is a bodily means of telling stories, which functions outside of a visual and written logic, goes beyond it, and indeed can neither be grasped by nor fully understood through it. It is as subtle as it is powerful, in the way it reshapes our perspectives and the intersections of time, space and place we are able to imagine, the futures we are able to think of, not only on a cognitive, but also on a sensual level. Many attempts to establish alternative histories, and for that matter, futures – from the Chimurenga music through dub poetry to jazz - have been born out of the necessity 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.“

In his essay “Of the Sorrow of Songs” James Baldwin explores the powerful nature of the sonorous in redeeming and retelling histories, as well as their reluctance to be understood and ruled by anyone who does not feel and comprehend the histories they emerged from in the framework of jazz music and culture. He claims that nobody who does not understand the auction-block, who cannot see that the middle passage was the demolition accomplished in the name of civilization, and cannot face the atrocities that came with it “can never pay the price for the beat which is the key to music, and the key to life. Music is our witness, and our ally. The beat is the confession which recognises, changes and conquers time. Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which to hide: and time becomes a friend.”

In his seminal publication “The Philosophy of the Sea”, Esiaba Irobi harshly accused G.W.F. Hegel and Edmund Husserl of never really fully understanding what phenomenology really means or how it functions as an act of community and a tool for social, spiritual and political engineering of diverse peoples of the world. Irobi used Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s redefine the phenomenon to show, from an African and African diasporic epistemic and performative perspective, phenomenology could be understood through the experiential, physical dimension of embodied performance as practised in many African and African diasporic communities. Irobi expatiated on how the body in African and African diasporic cultures “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 analogy of music on vinyl here 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 ‘quotidien’, in dance and other rituals, the past is conveyed to the present and catapulted to the future. The transition and interconnection between the vocal utterances, speeches, sounds and music to performativity and an embodied experience within space and place is the core of this project. So while Irobi proposes that:

“…the Africans who were translocated to the new world lost their names, their languages, their geographies and original communities but they still replicated syncretized versions of indigenous African performance forms such as Abakua, Candomble, Lucumi, Bembe and Carnival based on African theories of festivity and ritual performance.”

It is worth considering that most of these rituals and spaces are framed and modelled, motivated and driven, enlivened and animated by music and other sonic phenomena like vocal utterances, speeches, sounds.