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 started from scratch in Berlin—SAVVY Funk, which is also relayed on Deutschlandfunk’s event channel “Dokumente und Debatten.” For SAVVY Funk, artists are invited to take over twenty-four hours of programming, including news, weather, and other sections such as Unpacking Sonic Migration, Listen to the Other – disEmbodied Voices – Hybridized Techno, Saout Africa(s), and Piratensender. Participating artists collaborate with students from the Class for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, directed by Professors Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch, to prepare and operate the radio program. Singer and her team are also contributing 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 Deutschlandradio Kultur.

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