Merge
Concept:
Sounding Situations
Hamburg, Germany
Direction, composition, text:
Sounding Situations (Milena Kipfmüller, Jens Dietrich, Klaus Janek)
Musicians:
Sofia Borges, Michael Thieke, Klaus Janek, Milena Kipfmüller
Performance, text:
Eric 1key, Katharina Meves
Stage and video:
TÒ SU (Martina Mahlknecht, Martin Prinoth)
Technical management and light design:
Christopher Umney
Kostüme:
Anja Ruschival
Public relations:
Hark Empen
Production direction:
Fabia Mekus
Assistance:
Janka Kenk
Bujumbura, Burundi
Direction and performance:
Josué Mugisha, Claudia Munyengabe, Alain Kay Butoyi, Laura Sheila Inangoma
The music theater MERGE plays with how the process of recording makes us who we are – how real and fictive record buttons, repetition, sounds, music, and language create our identities.
In a photograph from 1906, a crowd in southern Rwanda gathers for a magical event in front of a small apparatus on a table. Behind the table is an official of the German colonial administration with a machine that sucks in the sound, carves the voices and the music into the wax rollers. The artists offer their talent without compensation. In MERGE, the musicians and performers become sound carriers who turn the stage into a sounding negotiation space: Who owns what and what belongs where? What is foreign? What is the own?
MERGE has been performed in Hamburg and Bujumbura simultaneously and in reverse, Burundian and Rwandan artists go in search of what is worth recording.
Funded by the Kulturbehörde Hamburg and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and performed at Kampnagel Hamburg and Elisabethkirche Berlin
links:
performances:
23. März 2024 Hoch X München
22. März 2024 Hoch X München
14. Nov. 2022 Elisabethkirche Berlin
13. Nov. 2022 Elisabethkirche Berlin
12. Nov. 2022 Elisabethkirche Berlin
29. Mai 2022 kampnagel Hamburg
28. Mai 2022 kampnagel Hamburg
27. Mai 2022 kampnagel Hamburg
26. Mai 2022 kampnagel Hamburg
video:
Trailer Merge
installation:
TRIPLE FEEDBACK
The piece Triple Feedback draws attention to mutual listening and the power of recording. During colonial expeditions of German anthropologists in Rwanda at the beginning of the 20th century, unequal encounters resulted in sound documents that are stored today in the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv and were not accessible to the local people for a long time.
In Triple Feedback, the artists’ group Sounding Situations investigates how power structures can be transformed through dialogue and new, original recordings.
Contemporary Rwandan songwriters, singers and music producers listen to the recordings that were previously inaccessible to them and send their analyses, comments, expertise, but also anger and rage back to Germany.
In their composition, the group Sounding Situations has transferred the old original recordings into their present musical language, which enters into an exchange with the visions and samples of contemporary Rwandan musicians.
The music was composed through a process of informing, listening and acting (playing, composing) according to the notion of own, and its fluidity.
sounddirection: Milena Kipfmüller
round table Kigali: Eric 1key
music: Klaus Janek, Sofia Borges, Michael Thieke, Milena Kipfmüller
dramaturgy and co thinking: Jens Dietrich
production: Fabia Mekus
DATES
13:00 +16:00 h
Hörraum Humboldt Forum Berlin
pictures:
Photos by Juha Hansen