I have heard about it
To hear is to be concentrated, a pause from the image,
disconnecting from the visual. Simulate visual darkness to
generate the depth of sound. Manifest the hearable.You enter a
vortex of impressions, sensations, feelings. Images still persist
but are generated differently. They remain on the inside of your
thoughts and are actualized otherwise, through the stimuli of
sound. How do you un-train the ear to sound? And if you un-train
the ear, do you also inevitably un-train the eye? Can you still
keep listening if there is no image? If the image was the place
and you have been removed, does the sound then become the
non-place? Unplaced, as in a longing for something that has been
taken. Something that has been torn down. Are there futures of
listenings? Futures that incorporate the things lost as well as
the persistence of the present?
Aleks is over there
laughter
in fact I
10 beers
that's how it's going to be
again
I put the attention onto the risk of historical repetitions.
Events re-occurring. Lessons of collectivity not learned.
Unlearned consciousness of (not) being together. Or of being
together in hurt.
don't waste your breath now
Or should we persist in looping breath? Making an effort in sound.
Committing to give an ear to the crowd, to the activists, to a new
nomadic theatre:
"[..] speaking - long considered to be a fundamental act of
human subjective communication - is, in fact, an act of pure auto
- affection that is built on a set of differences. For Derrida,
this auto-affection is a function of hearing oneself speak,
becomes fundamental to any assertion of subject-hood".1
To be intimate with the body in the auto-affection of the voice,
speaking to oneself, to the other, is a radical gesture of self
care. Voicing out delivers us to subject-hood and implies at the
same time, the re-appropriation of space as a political act of
self-determination where, the voice within the body and the voice
of the body operate in levels that are never detached.
He played with all the women,
exposed them all naked
ATA, (third person plural female pronoun) is an activist group of
Kamza founded by three women. They raise their voices, they gather
voices, mostly of younger generations of the marginalized
periphery, by dissenting and calling out. They created an activist
theatre: the Theater of ATA. It is a nomadic theatre placed in the
auto-affection of listening to the self-determining voice. "I
here propose to consider these moments of dissent precisely as
moments of joyful insurrection. By being a killjoy you are
actually enacting and enabling the possibility of a form of joyful
insurrection to emerge."2
birds singing
the peoples party,
the peoples party
we were wrong
Which voice is right? Which voices have the right? Should the
voice be plural? If plural then how are they to intertwine?
Overlapping, overhearing.
Giving space to the ecstasy of crying out is more than a scream.
and this is true democracy,
true democracy is when you face
the people and tell them the truth,
like I am here unafraid to talk to you,
thank you very much!
cheering people
clapping
Isolated sounds in electronic compositions, samples of a new way
of rediscovering noise. The ruptures of sound. Narratives of sound
collages. Fragmentation and unification. Patched realities of
noise, cheering(s), ruins, angered cry outs. Signification!
apparently the ground surface now officially belonging to the
municipality is 8822 square meters. So the city council has
reached the verdict of destroying a public property that never was
under its jurisdiction and for this it will be held accountable
and the mayor should resign and not hide behind political forces
bravo!
"At the beginning of the 20th century, many groups
and collectives in Russia identifying with the Futurist ideals,
explored the sound and the rhythm of words to achieve a radically
new experience of language. Their best known manifesto was
published in 1912 under the title 'Slap in the face of public
taste' "3
shame shame shame
go go go go
clapping
What I attempted to create is sounding images. Visual sounds of
story-hearing.
today we need to find
deep within ourselves
a new way of rebuilding our dignity
our freedom
My research for the present project followed the idea of
un-forming for which the form is relevant and functional in the
actualization of its opposite, that is, dismantling forms to
create a narrative that reveals the disruptures underlying any
infatuation concerning solidity. "Jean Dubuffet's dislike
towards organized knowledge and structures used the techniques of
manipulation as a weapon against the imperative of competence
which was nothing but unnecessary theoretical knowledge that
generates cascades of notes so that we can hear what we do not
feel"4 I was thus very careful in sampling and
remixing for the sake of balancing disconnections out,
disconnections that lead to new ways of restructuring our
perceptions in relations to political events, our own memory and
collective memory.
He found the right moment
Make us hear what we do not feel. Believe what we do not hear.
Feel the opposite of what was being asked for. We thought we were
asking for a way to be heared together? The present sound piece
relies heavily on the craving of being heard, personally and
collectively. The collective voice in the sound of protest is a
collectivity of painful admissions of what is actually wrong,
therefore also an admission of the will to heal and hence to love.
Albania to the Albanians
Death to the traitors
Albania to the Albanians
Death to the traitors
Where does noise and where does sound begin and end? Regular wave
structures and irregular wave structures overlapping. Pleasant and
unpleasant sensations of something being taken, appropriated. A
public gathering is an outcry for a public listening. The volume
is adjusted according to the repressive measures taken.
Hello, where are you?
Come, we are here, near the cloud
We have fought for freedom,
it has been 30 years
trying to understand
what freedom is
Speculation, cutting up, dissecting, seminating and disseminating
knowledge through activist work. Grassroots levels of mobilizing
desires of expressions which are not allowed to be. ATA were not
supposed to speak. No cultural public buildings in Kamza made
accessible for the very youth of Kamza. How does one then
translate the notion of public without ever having known it
before? The public common as a forbidden (non) place of the
displaced. Words and sounds in scripts and gardens, side roads and
the backyard of a house yet to be finished. Spaces remain
unofficial and are conquered temporarily as a stage. The
placelessness is thus naturalized in continuous movement. The
space of cultural expression becomes in fact the research of the
space itself. Placelessness becomes the perpetual imperative to
(re)stage and claim the unheard voice.
the son of Kadri Hazbiu,
the son of Kadri Hazbiu
we are here,
tens of thousands of Albanians
the son of Kadri Hazbiu,
the son of Kadri Hazbiu
Is what a protester called from the top of his lungs during the
protests against the demolition of Tirana's National Theater. I
remained stuck hearing the statement and could not help but
isolating and resampling this visceral outcry. An intimate thought
linking the past of the dictatorship to the present of a „liberal“
government. Many interpretations can arise, but the anger of the
voice was very attractive to me in terms of colliding
temporalities of two distinctive forms of brutalities; the death
of Kadri Hazbiu's son and the brutal action of tearing down the
National Theater of Tirana, while activists were still inside the
building. Both moments are intertwined heavily with violence and
oppressive government secrecy. They both stand for an undemocratic
approach in politics. Kadri Hazbiu's trial recalled back an
unprocessed, deeply criminal political past of murder and
persecution, not only of the simple population of Albania but also
the cannibalistic political complotisim of a dictatorial
government. On the other hand, my generation, who strongly helped
elect the current government's leader in the ecstasy of a promise
for a new political left, was being beaten during the protests and
put into prison by the same leader they helped so vehemently
elect. Moreover, the current government has perpetually tried to
hide, as well as strongly oppose, the right to protest of the
Kamza activists of ATA supporting the ecological protests for the
preservation of the natural park of Zall Gjocaj. Generational
trauma and violence manifesting in a loop of overlapping realities
and histories. Collision. Collapse. Vanishing. Emerging. I decided
to describe the official version of the death of Kadri Hazbiu's
son, Agron Dautaj to reference precisely this feeling of
unprocessed forms of violence of the past and its lingerings in
the present.
The son of Kadri Hazbiu,
the son of Kadri Hazbiu,
after his father was arrested,
he was senteced to forced labor
in the mines of Kurbnesh
in the Albanian region of Mirdita.
He worked in the depth of the mine
to extract copper.
Every day he would steal
some of the explosive for himself,
after he managed to secure
a significant amount,
he covered himself with it
and blew himself in the air.
It was 1989
Kadri Hazbiu was the chief of the Directorate of State Security
(Sigurimi) Albania's secret police, and Deputy of Internal Affairs
Minister from 1950 to 1954. On 23 July 1954, he was the successor
to Mehmet Shehu (who became prime minister) as the Minister of
Internal Affairs until 26 April 1980. He was also chief supervisor
of the Secret Service, Sigurimi. On 15 October 1982, Hazbiu was
arrested and lost his membership in the People's Assembly and in
the Politburo. He was accused of Mehmet Shehu ́s death and of
comploting against Albanians supreme leader, Enver Hoxha, A part
from Hazbiu, numerous other Party and State figures were arrested
and convicted in 1983 in secret trials. Hazbiu was executed on 15
September 1983 near Tirana. His youngest son, Agron (born in
1959), became a title-winning footballer with Dinamo Tirana in
1980 under the name Agron Dautaj. His career ended in 1982 when
his father was arrested and Agron was interned in Kurbnesh with
the other family members. His death on 28 January 1989 in one of
the Kurbnesh mines was deemed as a suicide by the communist
rulers.
time is chemical weapons, unleashed
time is chemical weapons,
unleashed
How can we look at time? Is it possible to make backward leaps
while moving forward? Circular movements headed forward, inward
and past-ward. What type of relation is created between
information, invocation and evocations of historical events
resulting in a composition of knowledge that is spinning because
of inward investigation inertia and yet orbiting around other
forms of knowledge and events? In queer methodology, Jack
Halberstam, describes knowledge production as a "scavenger
methodology that uses different methods to produce and collect
methodology. A queer methodology attempts to combine methods that
are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses
the academic compulsion towards disciplinary coherence"
5
crazy?
No I don't accept that,
I am not crazy
This act of aggression was
to derail the peace process
"Remix is made possible by a state of meta, which in turn, is
the process, by which the question of the beginning of anything is
displaced in order to develop ongoing signification." Euardo
Navas elaborates in his research about remix and sampling on a
diagram model framing the tautological process of meaning
creation. In appropriating the sample song Neurotoxin from Pariah,
I rely on its interaction with the sound footage of the activist
Theater of ATA and the protests for the National Theater, thus
initiating a process of ongoing signification and friction between
different voices and forms of sound.6
ok I will be crazy then,
Yes Mr Director,
I will pretend to be crazy,
are you pleased now?
Very well
long live
liberty
If we are to know the past, the present and the future of
ourselves, in what is only the now of collective trauma and
violence then, we will have to mash it up, to dissect, to
un-compose and recompose, to use words and sound as weapons
against a linear projection of time. The activist Theater of ATA
move through public spaces creating intimacies of soulful
investigations. It is their living rooms taken to the streets. The
protesters of the National Theater took an inner anger to the
streets. Protesting is all about making the outside as much
aligned to the emotional turmoil unfolding in the living room of
your own gutter. It is essentially about types of homely spiritual
intimacies domesticating the public space with feelings. "And
I want to argue that writers must all commit to learning to
disrupt, to read differently, to ask more of texts, to ask more of
the world than linear, normative functions allow."
7
Voices, sounds, ruptures accumulate in the psyche, in the soul, in
the visceral. They are repressed, requestioned, they seemingly
disappear, return vehemently in anger and in doubt. The personal
body and the collective body are made to be separated. But the
meanings they inter-wave with the environment, be this natural or
urban, remain un-resolutely inextricable. Being heard, sharing
voices, is the outmost form of intimacy and act of self love. If
we dissent and share feelings in the public space, it is the
public space being domesticized by the personal body. The public
space is the gutter, the living room and finally the body is
united in its surface, interiors and openings.
We will clean this river here,
we will make it like a pool to swim in,
why not?
with a trampoline, why not?
because this young man here
asked for it
They will also built a trampoline,
we will have a great time,
we will have a great time,
we will jump with our heads on
time is chemical weapons
unleashed