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WAYWARD VOICES IN INTERWAR MODERN ART:
GRAMMATOLOGY VERSUS GEO-PHILOSOPHIES
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Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Lecture performance
TheMuseumsLab
September 9, 2024
——- Sound Panel
Curated by Naima Hassan
Listening Act II.Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Wayward Voices in Interwar Modern Art: Grammatology versus Geo-Philosophies
MohamedAli Ltaief’s lecture performance negotiates and recontextualizes the genealogy of early music records in Tunisia / North Africa and in the diaspora. It situates transnational identities and engages with fragmented biographies of interwar artists, music producers, and dancers who performed in the first decade of the twentieth century. Ltaief expands the connections with the Arab and African Diaspora, specically focusing on singular histories such as the “Baidaphon" music label (founded in Berlin-Mitte 1912); the Tunisian artists they recorded, the involvement of performing and sound artists in the anti-colonial and anti-fascist era in North Africa and in exile. Ltaief’s lecture intertwines with scattered counter-archives that can be read in sound catalogues such as the independent music labels: "Oum-El-Hassen" Tunis 30s, "Rssaissi" Tunis 30s, "Fiesta" Paris 40s, "Maksoud" NYC 10—30s, and "Wardatone" Detroit, USA 50s.
TheMuseumsLab Module 2
SOUND PROGRAMME
to listen without extraction,
selchí:meleqel
what does this sound like?
to kick colonial listening habits,
to shift structures of feeling
Xwlálámethò:m
— Dylan Robinson
Sound programme On Sonic Restitutions and the Public Affects of Phonographic Archives is organised for TheMuseumsLab on Monday 9th, September 2024. Drawing from Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening (2020) the programme hosts three listening acts, a panel moderated by Nnenna Onuoha, and evening performance by Elsa M’bala at the Museum für Naturkunde. Organised as a sonic gathering—the panel at Spielfeld Hall addresses the under-examined status of sound in restitution discourse. Recognising the neglected status of sound archives, panellists Anette Homann, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief and Elsa M’bala introduce their critical engagements with colonial sound and early music recordings through research and performative offerings.
The panel begins with an offering by Annette Homann, on the Wolof acoustic traces left by Abdoulaye Niang—recorded during the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission (1915-1918). The significant German sound collection was established under the supervision of German musicologist Carl Stumpf with a mission to compile a collection of global language recordings that would constitute ‘a new kind of ethnology'.2 This 'Weltarchiv' formed by a group of philologists, linguists, musicologists, and anthropologists recorded the voices of colonial subjects held in internment camps across Germany, resulting in the production of 1,650 shellac records. Contained within these recordings, are echoes of African prisoners held in these camps, their refusals, mued laughers and quiet refrains. Held today at the Humboldt Forum’s Lautarchiv, these shellac records constitute an archival register of African, Asian and European languages recorded under the auspices of German imperial knowledge production.
MohamedAli Ltaief’s lecture performance contends with, and recontextualizes the genealogy of early music records in Tunisia/North Africa and in the diaspora, departing with recordings from the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv. Closing the panel, Elsa M'bala will oer a gesture towards sonic resocialization featuring the oldest recordings made in Cameroon. The programme will conclude with an evening fellow exchange and sound performance hosted by Elsa at TheMuseumsLab’s 2024 Public Event. Here, she presents Time to listen, a listening session of selected postcolonial African music cassettes from the Ass Niang Collection.
SOUND PANEL
Curated by Naima Hassan
Presentations by Anette Homann, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief & Elsa M’bala
13:30 discussion and Q&A moderated by Nnenna Onuoha
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THE CONCRETELY WE:
VOICES FROM WITHIN THE CAMP
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performance
Sometimes, he would stand up and express himself.
He wouldn’t speak, he would express.
— Frantz Fanon, “Black skin, white Masks”
The story of the protagonist Sadok Ben Rachid (Tunisian poet, singer, and prisoner of World War I) overlaps with fact and fiction. It is based on research conducted between the archive collections of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Lautarchiv Berlin, and other counter-archives, as well as Frantz Fanon’s body of work, including the play ‘Parallel Hands’ (1949). Sadok was a soldier of the North African Forces recruited by the French (1914) and used in the major battles of Europe before being captured by the Germans (1916). Following Fanon's theatrical and psychiatric thought, the performance aims to decipher the consequences of colonialism and the understanding of alienation that have produced multiple forms of relational illness. Sadok's existential sonic refusal/poem comes as an autobiographical counter-narrative, a form of resistance or rather survival, acknowledged and raises the notion of ethics and aesthetics for those who usually impersonates the voice’s subject.
Ltaief’s performance art project «The Concretely WE: Voices From Within The Camp» investigates and retraces the early phonographic sound archives that were commissioned and classified in the 1910s. These archives include prompt ethnographic recordings made by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, established by Wilhelm Doegen and assisted by H. Stumme and R. Lachmann with prisoners of the First World War at the “Half Moon camp” in Wünsdorf (south of Berlin) between 1915 and 1918.
Live Works Summit
July 20th, 2024
A strange news came to us in Ramadan,
And they confused us with their talk.
They pulled out papers and pens
And called us by name.
They dragged us to the Germans
And caused us to be wounded by their lead.
If God wanted to give us strength,
We didn’t ask about the government.
I was wounded between two mountains
And began to cry and complain.
My blood flowed in streams,
My whole body was sullied.
I was happy that the Germans took me away,
And thought I was coming home now,
But they locked me up with locks, -
Now I’m sitting here abandoned!
They tortured me in Belgium,
And the doctors treated me badly,
They wanted to amputate my foot,
Even the doctor gave up on me.
My blood flowed in streams,
Oh my God, help me.
Sadok Ben Rashid (War Poem)
Recorded by Wilhelm Doegen in the “Half-Moon camp”
Date of recording: 30.5.1916
Concept, Text Mohamed-Ali Ltaief Performance Mohamed-Ali Ltaief, Lamin Fofana & Tarxun Curated by Barbara Boninsegna and Simone Frangi coproduction: Centrale Fies, Dro (IT) Kaaitheater Brussels (BE) and Tanzfabrik Berlin (DE) Mophradat consortium-commissions/2023-2025
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PARALLEL HANDS — CO-EXISTENCE OF TIMES
AND THE GOOD WILL TO LISTEN
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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
coproduction: Centrale Fies, Dro (IT) Kaaitheater Brussels (BE) and Tanzfabrik Berlin (DE) Mophradat consortium-commissions/2023-2025
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POEISIS, PRAXIS, AND CULTURES OF RESISTANCE
OR THE NON ESTABLISHED HISTORIES OF ART
IN TUNISIA
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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)
Publishing Practices 3
Weaving the Inner Bark Festival
www.archivesites.org
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THE STRANGENESS OF THE STRANGER
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sonic performance
Broadcast on Resonance Extra London
25 September 2021 (from midday to midnight)
Text: Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, Julia kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett. Recording and sound art: Omar Karray / Voices: Marina Resende, Santos, Ayed Fadhel, Rindala Pereverzev and Mohamedali Ltaief.
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THE PATH OF THE SUN OR THE BARE LIFE
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performance
Madrasa El Achouria, Tunis
22.06-2021
Mohamedali conducted research during his residency in Tunis on the market of Chinese products: the Boumendil market in the Medina of Tunis. In particular, he investigates the impact of the Chinese market on Boumendi street history/the Medina of Tunis and explores with Omar Karray their particular soundscape.
The path of the sun or the bare life طريق الشّمس أو الحياة العارية
A performance project by Mohamedali Ltaief
with Omar Karray and Rindala Pereverzev
video Imed Aouadi
sound Omar Karray
video performance Slim Baccar
Voices: Marina Resende Santos, Ayed Fadhel,
Rindala Pereverzev and Mohamedali Ltaief.
production manager Wissal Bettaibi
Production of L'Art Rue - Supported by Goethe-Institut Tunis
and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture - AFAC. Research grants in the field of performing arts/dance 2019 —Senate Berlin.
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THE PATH OF THE SUN OR THE BARE LIFE
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research / residency
March_May 2021
L'Art Rue, Tunis, Tunisia
Exile in Arabic is Eghtirab —Moghtareb which means, the person who walks towards the sunset—Ghouroub. The exile is an utopian counter-space as Michel Foucault says in the utopia of the body: “My body is like the city of the sun, it has no place, but it is from itself that emerge and shine all possible places, real ones or utopic ones”.
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HUNDERT JAHRE WEINEN
ODER HUNDERT BOMBEN WERFEN
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Theater Basel
18.10-19
Darja Stocker and Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
PREMIERE
”Reto” has been an outcast all his life. From early childhood, he is continually being sent away: from his father in Basel to his mother in Geneva, as a child labourer from one farm to the next. In his search for affection and recognition, he is repeatedly degraded and humiliated. Eventually, he finds himself on a ship from Marseille to Algiers, going to war as a mercenary and trying his luck in the Foreign Legion. The Legion suggests togetherness and security but at the same time, it means constantly living in fear. Finally, Reto is called to account in a court trial and is forced to look back on his life of torment.