Louis Chude-Sokei
What are the politics of listening? What is the role of the ear in framing histories of protest and performance? Writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei and Performa cordially invite you to join us at a keynote in the form of an experiment in listening.Founder of the international sonic archive, Echolocution, Chude-Sokei will interweave his critical work and auto-biographical experiences, as part of an ongoing exploration of the role of sonic ecologies in shaping contemporary culture.
Schedule
Saturday, Nov. 4: 5:30pm
RSVP
History is Listening: Sound, Space, Race and Memory
What are the politics of listening? What is the role of the ear in framing histories of protest and performance? Writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei and Performa cordially invite you to join us at a keynote in the form of an experiment in listening.
Founder of the international sonic archive, Echolocution, Chude-Sokei will interweave his critical work and auto-biographical experiences with his long engagement with the politics of listening, as part of an ongoing exploration of the role of sonic ecologies in shaping contemporary culture.
Drawing from “Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention,” a two year project in which he gathered an international group of artists, thinkers, musicians, and scholars as a collective aimed at re-sonifying the ruins of the former Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Chude-Sokei will share tracks and field recordings featuring Kurdisani singer and activist Hani Mojtahedy, Armenian scholar and violinist Gascia Ouzounian, African American artists Mendi and Keith Obadike, as well as German artist/musician Jan St. Werner, all for whom sonic politics activate space and history in order to imagine and generate inter-relational futures.
About Louis Chude-Sokei
Louis Chude-Sokei’s work includes the award-winning, The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015), the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (2021) and the German publication, Technologie Und Race: Essays Der Migration (2023). A professor of English, he directs the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University and edits The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies in the United States. Chude-Sokei is also founder of the sonic art and archival project, Echolocution.
Collaborations include work with iconic electronic experimentalists, Mouse on Mars with whom he produced the album, AAI: Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (2021) and the legendary Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company who adapted his work for their touring performance, Curriculum II. He was a curator of Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism as well as curator and lead artist for Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention, a multi-year sound art project at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany.
Credits
Organized by Defne Ayas and Kathy Noble.
Supporters
Protest and Performance: A Way of Life is supported by the Ford Foundation and as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.
Performa Team
Senior Program Advisor and Curator at Large: Defne Ayas
Senior Curator: Kathy Noble
Hartwig Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow: Sakhi Gcina
Performa Biennial 2023 Baltic Fellow: Tina Petersone
