Overtones | RADIONISTS Symposium

Curated by Lara Khaldi
 
As part of a larger project on Radio technology and content in Palestine that Goethe-Institut Ramallah is working on, Overtones asks questions about listening and the voice.
 
Sounds and voices pervade spaces, and travel through walls and doors. Unlike hearing, the act of listening is voluntary. Through a selection of sounds and voices the ear wanders off eavesdropping, or recognizes the authority of a public voice, or resolutely abstains from listening. Listening is a form of recognition. The ear is a battlefield, where various sounds and voices are competing to be heard. Sound transgresses spaces and transforms them, a park becomes private with a whisper between two, and a home becomes part of the street with traffic sounds. Listening is where collectives are forged, and can simultaneously produce onanistic forms of non participation.
 
Listening is potentiality. Jean Luc Nancy writes that ‘To be listening is to always be on the edge of meaning’. Listening is full of possibility. If the voice is the physical extension of the self, then listening is the recognition of all beings. It is not a relationship of emittance and receival but rather of simultaneous sonic resounding.
 
How do different sonic fields and voices relate to power and hegemony? Could how does listening change our perception of specific sounds? or our recognition of the oppressed? What is the sound of settler colonialism? How do we listen to the sounds and voices of emancipation? What and where are they?
 
Overtones is a project about listening and the politics of the voice and sound in Palestine and elsewhere. The project unfolds as an exhibition, symposium, listening tours and workshop program. While some works address how certain sounds and voices are hegemonic in urban areas, others invite us to listen to forgotten and suppressed voices.