PARALLEL HANDS —
CO-EXISTENCE OF TIMES
AND THE GOODWILL TO LISTEN
performance
Tanzfabrik Berlin
24.02.2024
Ltaief’s research performance project «PARALLEL HANDS — Co-existence of Times and the Good Will to Listen» investigates the legacy of North African sonic archives in the collection of Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv and Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. It specifically re-traces the early phonogram sound archives that were commissioned and classified during the 1910s and are today settled in ethnomusicological collections stored in Berlin at SMB museums. These archives include recordings made by the German Phonographic Commission, established by Wilhelm Doegen and assisted by Robert Lachmann with prisoners of the First World War, between 1915 and 1918 at the Half Moon camp in Wünsdorf (south Berlin). Some of these prisoners were Tunisian, like Sadok Ben Rashid.
This project critically investigates notions of record and archive, raising questions about ethnological field recording practices under the violence of European Colonialism; about the limits of translation, and the enduring myth of universal art doctrines.
The double showing is followed by a discussion with the artists
Concept and text: Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Performance: Mohamed-Ali Ltaief and Tarxun
Curated by Barbara Boninsegna and Simone Frangi
Mophradat consortium-commissions/2023-2025
coproduction: Centrale Fies, Dro (IT) Kaaitheater Brussels (BE)
and Tanzfabrik Berlin (DE)
Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance,
or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia
Archive Books Berlin
Saturday 26 August 2023
Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Lecture performance
Archive Books Berlin
Reinickendorfer Str. 17
13347 Berlin
Unpacking our Library #6
Curator Paz Guevara
5 – 6.30 pm
Reading Circle
Workshop as part of
Unpacking our Library #6
Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
By registration: malab@archivesites.org
Based on the ongoing research-based project of an artist that confronts and expands the meaning of sonic archives, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief offers a Reading Circle to share and discuss the genealogy of early ethnomusicological field recording in Tunisia, while reassembling cartographies of interwar artists in North Africa and in the diaspora. In the Reading Circle workshop, Ltaief will share a selection of readings that he refers to in his lecture performance ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’, re-contextualizing cuts and ruptures during colonial times, and unraveling the multiplicity of sonic performative practices. The Reading Circle is open to everyone interested in African performance art histories and sonic performative art practices, anti-colonial and anti-fascist early political movements in North Africa, decolonial theories, and practices of transformation of archives.
7 – 8 pm
Unpacking our Library #6
Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of
Resistance or the non-established
Histories of Art in Tunisia
Unpacking Our Library invites Tunisian artist and author Mohamed-Ali Ltaief to re-entangle and negotiate the meaning of a North African sonic archive collection recorded during the first decade of the 20th Century by the Prussian Phonographic Commissions in North Africa, and now stored and dispersed, in part at the Berliner Phonogramm Archiv (SMB) at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and in part at the Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis. Ltaief’s Lecture performance ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’ questions the dispositive of sonic archival material in those collections by displacing the Ethno-musicological illusion. Through the lecture, Ltaief revoices extended biographies and foregrounds sonic performances, confronting the static sonic archival materiality and the corporate identity of the Western aesthetic taxonomy. By shifting the sonic archive into a spatialized and performative practice, Ltaief opens those archives to art histories across Berlin, Beirut, Cairo, and Tunis. Acknowledging the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “Poiesis and Praxis’, the lecture is composed of acts of translating lyrics, retracing movements-body language, and re-locating biographies and counter archives. This lecture performance ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’ by Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is a sonic-visual and geo-philosophical narrative that combines sonic testimonies with spatial strategies, border studies, and decolonial aesthetic methods. ‘Poiesis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’ by Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is part of ‘the Striated Time’ performance trilogy project and publication. With the kind support of Mophradat Consortium Commissions 2023/25, Jaou Festival Tunisia, and Ennejma Ezzahra Tunis. — Courtesy Center of Arab and Mediterranean Music (CMAM)
