Derivas sonoras
La nostalgioteca - HKW Berlín
La nostalgioteca es el nombre que le hemos dado a una metodología que diseñamos hace algunos años y que hoy traemos al evento organizado por la Bauhaus-Universität Weimar y el Goethe-Institut "Listening to the World" en Haus der Kulturen der Welt, en Berlin.
A través del sonido, proponemos un encuentro con la memoria de ciertos movimientos: los viajes, las migraciones, las huídas, los regresos, las travesías. Para que, mientras se camina, se haga evidente la relación entre movimiento y sonido como elementos claves para despertar nuestra voluntad de narrar y escuchar lo vivido.
Through sound recordings, we will create an encounter with the memories of social movements: journeys, migrations, escapes, returns, and border crossings. As we walk, the bond between movement and sound becomes meaningful: key narrative elements appear along the conversation and listening gestures, awakening our willingness to share and listen to our experiences of movements.
“La Nostalgioteca" is the name of an artistic methodology that Noís Radio Collective designed some years ago and is now featured in "Listening to the World" at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin.
How does it work?
It is an outdoor radio walk where sound plays a conversation starter role, as well as a memory connector, highlighting topics such as travel, movement, and migration.
On this occasion, we will have two days of soundwalks. The leitmotif of day one will be focused on actions like going, drifting, leaving, and on Day two will be focused on actions like staying and remaining.
Participants will be invited to take the walk while listening to several audio recordings. They will be prompted to listen from conceptual and bodily "Listening points." Based on what they have heard, they can share their own stories, sounds, sensations, or memories. The walks will be audio-streaming online.
How does it work?
It is an outdoors radio walk in which sound appears as a conversation starter and memory connector on topics such as travel, movement and migration.
The participants are invited to take the walk and listen to an audio. Based on what they have heard, they can share a story, a sound, a sensation or a memory of their own.
In addition, the same participants will be able to question other people outside the group (passers-by meet along the way) to propose the exchange of sounds and stories to enrich the nostalgioteca.
NOSTALGIOTECA SOUND ARCHIVES
Translations of the audio testimonies
DAY 1
1: "The memorable, as De Certeau explains, is that which becomes present in absence, 'it is what can be dreamt about a place' (De Certeau, 1996, pp. 121).
Memory is life, always embodied by living groups and, in that sense, is in constant evolution, open to the dialectic of remembrance and forgetfulness, unaware of its successive deformations, vulnerable to all uses and manipulations, capable of long latencies and sudden revitalizations (Nora, 2009, 20).
In his text 'Les lieux de mémoire,' Nora defines places of memory as remnants or illusions of eternity. For him, 'museums, archives, cemeteries, and collections, celebrations, anniversaries, treaties, records, monuments, shrines, associations, are the witness hills of another era...' (Nora, 2009, pp. 24). In this sense, we understand that the city is a place of memories that we can explore by referring to physical spaces but also to cultural events or collective expressions that are activated for a purpose: for memory to serve justice and for the past to help us react to new horrors, present and close to our reality (Todorov, 2000).
Talking about the journey, deciding where to go, recalling what is no longer there, establishing some reference points, and creating a collective narrative. De Certeau called space narratives because 'they traverse and organize places; they select them and gather them at the same time; they make sentences and itineraries with them. They are journeys through spaces' (De Certeau, 1966, pp. 128). Walks awaken the will to narrate and organize the path.
To retrace to remember, to revisit the heart of things. People, objects, animals, and spaces transform or disappear, taking with them the sounds of a specific time, the sounds once heard.
Regarding the relationship between listening and space, musician David Toop asks in his book 'Sinister Resonance': How can we then listen to sounds never before perceived, sounds that vanished a long time ago, or sounds that are not exactly sounds but rather fluctuations of light, weather, and a particular feeling that can appear when one is very aware of space? (Toop, 2013, pp. 87).
We could project an answer to questions about sounds that are no longer present, and this answer is precisely linked to the experience of walking as an enunciative act (determined by movements and transformations of places) and how these places become inhabitable and present in the city's narrative. The city as a practiced and inhabitable place through pedestrian utterances (De Certeau, 1996). This is the case with the set of songs and voices heard in the urban environment, which vary from region to region due to accents and rhythms. For Armando Silva, the songs of cities 'deserve to be preserved for our future memory, before various circumstances make them disappear completely' (Silva, 1993, pp. 24).
For Toop, 'sounds can loiter like vital presences, an intervention that reconfigures the environment and has existed for a long time, and whose absence can make us stop to think or feel more intensely while walking, working, or waiting' (Toop, 2013, pp. 88). Silva says that although not all cities sing, those that do 'retain a vitality that suggests strange spiritual forces' (Silva, 1993, pp. 24). The sounds that are no longer present are echoes that, although often go unnoticed, are part of the construction of space, of what makes them references in time, traces of what has happened, of what has been experienced.
After all, visiting the space of memories is about pursuing moments, people, and places that allow us to establish a connection with the past, even if we are not certain whether they are linked to lived experiences or delusional, imagined memories. Since memory is not unique, nor is it its own entity, but rather composed, among other things, of narrative gaps and silences, it serves to activate the past in the present (Jelin, 2002).
What is shown points to what is no longer there: 'you see, here was...'. Demonstratives express the invisible identities of the visible: it is, indeed, the very definition of place, to establish these series of shifts and effects between the divided strata that compose it and to act on these shifting densities (De Certeau, 1996).
Walking through the city, recognizing the sounds that have been replaced, modified, silenced, and finding in the narratives generated while probing or 'listening and investigating with an open attitude, without having a clear idea of where the listening can lead us' (Toop, 2013, pp. 93), the traces they left in people's identity and memory, to discover that lived places are like presences of absences." (“Recorridos sonoros como metodología de investigación para visitar el espacio de los recuerdos” by María Juliana Soto)
2: We came to live on the shore of two rivers, the Ovejas river, with which I have a strong relationship and the Cauca River, where I only have the memories of my mayores y mayoras (my elders). Memories of my elders. In the Ovejas river we used to go fishing. I remember when I was a little girl, we used to go with my grandfather. We set up the barbecues and we would see my grandfather over there, looking at what time the fish would come in and meanwhile, with my older cousins, we lighted a fire with a lot of wood that we had found on the shore of the river. My grandfather took out the fish and we grilled them on a plátano leaf and we also roasted the bunch of plátanos we had brought with us. That was many times on moon nights. And for me that is the most beautiful story I have of the river” (Francia Márquez intervention in “Somos Agua en el Agua” radio show by Noís Radio. Cali, 2018)
DAY 2:
1: “When I worked at the typographer´s, I made his calendars, based on the calendars where you saw pictures of the Swiss mountains, with snow, I used to say to myself, what a dream, but I never imagined I was going to live like that, I mean, that I was ever going to go to Switzerland, never, never.
I went myself to that company without speaking a word, but in those times life in Switzerland was so good they didn't mind, I told them I spoke English, French, Spanish, and they believed me. I didn’t know anything, not even English. Yes, I took a big risk, I said I knew French, English and German, I swear to god. The guy, my boss, spoke to my husband, not me, can you imagine? So he called a girl who worked there, she was Spanish, to show me around the warehouse, where all the shoes were stored. I was so stupid because I thought that being from Spain she would speak in Spanish… so when I went to the warehouse and my husband stayed in the office with my boss, I said to her, just between us, because I thought she spoke Spanish… I said “hey, I told this guy I know French and English but I just know Spanish” and she said “Well lady, you´re going to have to tell him the truth because you need to know the languages to work here”.
A week later they told me I had to go outside because there was no staff, that I had to go sell the shoes” I came home crying almost everyday. And my husband told me, “Don’t go”, and I said “I have to go, I have to go”. And I did. But go figure, I worked there for sixteen years” (Alba Wobman Torres intervention in “Desandares” radio documentary by Noís Radio. 2021)
2: “Five years ago, the words Bett, Fenster, Baum, Hafen were just sounds, echoes, vibrations. They weren't a bed, window, tree, port. They didn't mean anything to me. At what point does language start to speak to you? At what moment does Hafen become a port?” (Voices and rumors from three ports: Buenaventura, Panama, and Hamburg. Radio performance by César Torres and Luis Miguel Varela)
3: “On this anxious morning, when chroniclers transcribed a hundred voices and invented a new and comprehensible inferno, I wanted to talk to you about friendship and the concept of a country. I wanted to talk to you about ordinary sounds, when and where and why we listen. What does a port sound like? Can you hear the enormous cargo ship arriving from the high seas? In German, to listen is "hören" or "zuhören." To belong is "gehören." I like to translate listening as belonging. When you listen, you are belonging to a place. If you can hear something, you are not lost. What did you hear in my voice messages? Did you feel lost when you heard my hoarse voice? Could you distinguish the port of Hamburg in my audios? I recorded for you the sounds of Landungsbrücken, conversations in German, rumors, seagulls, their clamor, their hunger, and their fear. You couldn't hear the sea coming from the north through the Elbe River, but you can imagine it. You will also imagine how the sailors follow the path indicated by the wind's tongue. You will imagine the same sailors sleeping with the sea in their heads and the waves in their blankets. You will imagine the same sailors dreaming of Jesus walking on the water.
In your WhatsApp voice messages, while you were telling me about your journey to Hamburg, the wind was audible (the wind that doesn't need translation), and I was thinking of us…” (Voices and rumors from three ports: Buenaventura, Panama, and Hamburg. Radio performance by César Torres and Luis Miguel Varela)
4)
It rains in my land now
It rains in my land
I don't have no land, I don't have nobody, I don't have nobody
I don't have nothing
In my land the sun rises
In my land the sun is gone
But where am I from?
Where am I from?
But where am I from?
Where am I from?
Where do I come from?
I don't have my land,
I have no one
I do the chorus,
Where do I come from?
Who accompanies me to make the patch?
There is no companion for the night
And for the night
There is no one
The finger in the wound
No one accompanies me
With music in the background
Peaceful alcoholirycos
Giving me what I need
O-I-O-O-E
O-I-O-O-E
Where do I come from? (Song by Gustavo Martínez)