‘Sonic Dawn’ is a night where to collectively experience different contributions on the emergence of the unheard. How do we further develop our ability to listen for what is left out, and to what degree are we able to listen to different kinds of voices and intelligences? From a concert giving voice to non-human elements, to reflections on the ungraspability of sound as a form of resistance; until a collective training to discover in one’s own mouth the presence of sound belonging to foreign languages, Sonic Dawn invites to a sonic journey – from night till dawn – towards what was not audible and yet there. The only source of light in this listening space is a screen projecting the color of the sea from late afternoon till the dawn, reduced to pure shade.

‘Sonic Dawn’ is a project of Aleppo for Homo Novus.

During the course of the night spectators can enter and leave between the acts. Ticket includes breakfast.

Timeline

23:00 Catherina Christer Hennix, SOLITON STAR
23:30 Sonic Dawn, an introduction
23:40 Brandon LaBelle, The Invisible
23:45 Enrico Malatesta, Rudimenti Part 1
00:05 Lina Lapelytė, Candy Shop
00:35 Elsa M’bala, Makai
01:10 Brandon LaBelle, The Overheard
01:20 Maurice Stierl, Disobedient Listening at Sea
02:10 Ana Guedes, UNTITLED RECORDS Part 1
02:30 Raafat Majzoub, A Closeup on the Sound of Blooming
03:30 Brandon LaBelle, The Itinerant
03:40 Enrico Malatesta, Rudimenti Part 2
04:00 Ana Guedes, UNTITLED RECORDS Part 2
04:20 Aela Royer, Slip Off Tongues
05:20 Brandon LaBelle, The Weak
05:30 Breakfast
06:30 Sunset

Episodes

Catherine Christer Hennix (Berlin)
SOLITON STAR, RESONANCE REGION lA [ZERO-TIME SONIC MIRROR]
Concert

“The concept of an infinitary composition assigns equal significance to any point of its continuum sound. In particular, no significance is assigned to its beginning or end while any significance that is assigned to any of its parts must also be assigned to any other of its points in time – as defined by this continuum”, Catherine Christer Hennix
‘Sonic Dawn’ starts with a historic work by Swedish-American sound and visual artist, poet and mathematician, a drone pioneer C.C. Hennix, built on the idea of the infinitary composition and inviting on a journey within the continuum sound.

Brandon LaBelle (Berlin/Bergen)
Sonic Agency: Four Figures of Resistance.
The Invisible, the Overheard, the Itinerant, and the Weak
Four Sonic Lectures

In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? In ‘Sonic Agency, Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance’ (published in 2018), Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage the contemporary conditions of social and political crisis by way of sonic thought and imagination. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize sound and listening to address conflict by dividing sound’s functions into four figures of resistance – the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak. At the occasion of ‘Sonic Dawn’ LaBelle streams throughout the night four micro-lectures corresponding to these four figures. By doing so he unsettles traditional notions of the “space of appearance”, inviting the sonic as the condition for political action and survival.

Enrico Malatesta (Cesena)
Rudimenti
Concert

Trained as a musician and a percussionist, Enrico Malatesta has a peculiar approach to materials and objects: he does not simply play them, but rather gives voice to latent sounds they already contain. By doing so, he disconnects in a very sensitive way the notion of sound from an anthropocentric form of listening. Sound exists independently on our ability to perceive it, and maybe non-human elements are listening to each other, while we are unable to listen to them.

Lina Lapelytė (London/Vilnius)
Candy Shop
Performance

Candy Shop is best known as a dirty rap hit by 50 Cent. Candy Shop by Lina Lapelytė reworks the games of power that are embedded in the rap songs into lullabies, narrating the story about beauty, gender and the mundane. It’s a performance merging live and recorded intervention.

Elsa M’bala (Berlin)
Makai
Poetry / Video, hd 3:22 min
Commissioned by Berlin Biennale

Antoine Francois Assoumou was a young Cameroonian poet whose works got to see the light only after his tragic death. He was 16 when he died the night before his birthday. Death was very present in his work as if he knew that his journey was going to be short. His poems are as melancholic as they are fantastical. He writes as if he had never belonged in this world at the same time his use of language and words is incredibly skilled. Antoine was part of the invisible and as such his work will remain out of this world. In the video piece we witness how his words are translated into a visual poetry in German sign language making a bridge between the silence and the noise. It’s about making a connection where there seems to be none – between darkness and light, sound and silence, stillness and rapidity. We attempt to fill the void with our imagination.

Maurice Stierl (Berlin)
Disobedient Listening at Sea
Talk / Listening session

Illegalised migration across the Mediterranean Sea and its control are predominantly perceived through media images of indistinguishable masses of non-white bodies crammed onto unseaworthy vessels. These images operate within an ambivalent regime of (in)visibility at play at EU maritime frontier, which occludes as much as it reveals. Through the notion of disobedient listening, Maurice Stierl, an expert in migration and border studies, and one of the founding members of WatchTheMed Alarm Phone, discloses his work by focusing on sound and the right to listen in the unlikely and seemingly inaccessible spaces of the sea.

Ana Guedes (The Hague)
UNTITLED RECORDS
Performance / Concert

UNTITLED RECORDS is a performative sound installation weaving historical and emotional narratives through the “instrumentalisation” of a collection of records. An ensemble of reimagined record players are instruments built to perform an intimate selection from a family archive of popular music, a set of records carefully shipped home from a country at war forty years ago. The vinyls were purchased in Angola, Portugal and Canada over a time span from the 60s to the early 80s and have travelled over three continents. They exist as passive witnesses of a displacement in time and space.

Raafat Majzoub (Beirut)
A Closeup on the Sound of Blooming
Performance / Radio transmission / Whatsapp group chat

‘A Closeup on the Sound of Blooming’ is a durational performance that attempts to enable the impossible task of reinstatement of 70 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem demolished by the IDF on 22 July 2019. For that journey, artist Raafat Majzoub uses Hekmat – one of the fictional characters in his novel – to travel to Palestine, a neighboring country that he is not allowed to visit due to a state of war between Israel and Lebanon. The sound generated by sketching and re-tracing architectural drawings of the destroyed homes and a live Whatsapp group chat on the autobiography of another Arab World yields a visceral, paramilitary response to the demolition.

Aela Royer (Brussels)
Slip Off Tongues
Listening session / Workshop

‘Slip Off Tongues’ is a dive into the sonic heart of words; an access to the vibrational substance of language beyond its meaning. Gradually, the idea of tongue is processed into sounds, then being propagated, densified, modulated and stretched within the mouth that forms them. ‘Slip Off Tongues’ is also a practice of travelling inside the human voice revealing it’s potential for any sound of any tongue before being transformed into words, cultures and differences. How to access the otherness from the inside of one’s own voice and listening?