CTM 2019: The Sonic Volume as a Sphere of Non-resilience by Salomé Voegelin by CTM Festival

Thursday 31 January 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence

Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Video available via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve67x-dFLwA

Political Resilience refers to the capacity of political organizations to adapt and evolve, and it demands of the individual to evolve with it, to assume the governmental reality as the only one possible. Thus it interprets the elasticity of resilience as compliance, i.e. to accept low wages, precarity, uncertainty, even war. To demonstrate a Personal Resilience that shows patriotism and national pride. In this context, the phrase ‘being in it together’ is used to bring austerity, suffering, and loss into the pretext of a greater good and as the only defence against a worse fate. Such resilience is a visual phenomenon, not because it is literally seen but because it builds itself on the visual consciousness and history of walls and boundaries, on the mythological and iconographic reality of nationhood, and belonging against an invisible and inarticulate threat and otherness.

This performance talk enquires and tests whether sound, as material as well as sonic sensibility and consciousness, might offer an alternative imagination. Not as a counter-resilience, but as an unperforming of resilience, political and personal, in its indivisible sphere. To produce and hear a sonic cosmos composed of processes and relationships, whose materiality is voluminous and formless rather than pliant, and whose political possibility is plural, including also what appears impossible.