ribs #13 - Transart Advisor Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro / Listening at Pungwe

Together with Gilles Aubry and Nathalie Anguenzomo Mba Bikoro, Radio In Between Spaces explores "Black A(n)thena (Kosmos)"; practices of listening and radio as means to decolonize and untrain the ear from hegemonic listening knowledge. Drawing on material from piracy radios, Black A(n)thena follows the entangled histories of German settlements and anti-colonial struggles in Gabon and elsewhere. The artists follow the multiple traces of writer and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso, who reappears on a banana plantation in Gabon as the goddess “Camissonae”, while nature transmits testimonies and warnings to the plantation laborers. Black A(n)thena draws on the role of the scientific perpetrator rather than the native as subject and counter-reacts to the technologies of sound recordings and transmissions used in early 20th century.

Listening at Pungwe – the joint project of Namibian historian Memory Biwa and sound artist Robert Machiri – also trace German colonialism in their radiophonic lecture performance “Dzimudzangara: A Spectral Figuration of Archival Voices”. The tale is of Kingigitile ‘Bokero’ Ngwale, who — possessed by the spirit-medium, Hongo — recruits fighters against the German invaders. The piece takes unexpected turns as the artists overlay many decades of vinyl recordings with songs, poetry and their momentary gestures into the past.

Listen in on Radio In Between Spaces (ribs)  https://www.inbetweenspaces.net, www.p-node.org (with the possibility to comment or ask questions later) or via this live stream link