Ars Electronica Archive
Prix
Prix Map
Pictures
Videos
Publications
Special Projects
Women in Media Art
Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Listening at Pungwe
Original: 06 julius eastman opening 1020 x 0 (06_julius_eastman_opening.1020x0_copy_2.jpg) | 1020 * 1020px | 151.5 KB
Original: Listening at Pungwe (DSC_6515.jpg) | 4288 * 4288px | 8.1 MB
Original: REELTOREEL (REELTOREEL.jpg) | 902 * 902px | 160.7 KB
Original: Listening at Pungwe (DSC_0077.jpg) | 3008 * 3008px | 1.8 MB
Original: Julius Eastman 2018 (47_Julius-Eastman_2018.jpg) | 1736 * 1736px | 409.7 KB
Original: Main-image-16-12-Pungwe-Night---Machiri---Biwi (Main-image---16-12-Pungwe-Night---Machiri---Biwi.jpg) | 2200 * 2200px | 526.3 KB
Original: julius eastman (julius_eastman.jpg) | 2550 * 2550px | 2.0 MB
Listening at Pungwe is a collaborative project that produces sonic installations and performances through the interplay of analog and digital audio-visual recordings and technologies. Our exploration of Southern African instrumentation, with a focus on the mbira, examines the history of remix, re- possession, transformation, and adaptation, listening to the centrality of instruments as modes of exchange and transportation of voices. Sound technology can be heard as a simulacrum of ancestral voices that link the three intersecting dimensions of time--past, present, and future. When there is need for deep spiritual commitment and moral elevation, people tend to converge in song. This phenomenon is a convergence of people involving sound. A gathering of this form was known as Pungwe (Shona word for vigil), during Zimbabwe's armed liberation movement. It was mediated through mbira music rituals. We draw the ideological framework of an event we call PUNGWE from this narrative. The project Pungwe is an inter-disciplinary project circling African music with related contemporary arts practices and spaces. This practice takes the shape of a participatory public platform hosting alternative music and sound performances.
The platform creates a performative episteme and praxis, a 'listening' that places the moment of recording and re-play in a dialectical relationship, which, while marking the distinction in the relay, allows one to re-create a new sonic version. Our use of 'the remix framework' as an approach provides an interrogatory vantage point of mbira, viewing it not only as a cultural product, but also as an extension of the broader African futurist imagination.
Links: https://listeningatpungwe.wordpress.com
The platform creates a performative episteme and praxis, a 'listening' that places the moment of recording and re-play in a dialectical relationship, which, while marking the distinction in the relay, allows one to re-create a new sonic version. Our use of 'the remix framework' as an approach provides an interrogatory vantage point of mbira, viewing it not only as a cultural product, but also as an extension of the broader African futurist imagination.
Links: https://listeningatpungwe.wordpress.com
With support from Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Germany, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, DAAD - Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Goethe Institute (Namibia), ProHelvetia (Johannesburg), PASS at Chimurenga, Capetown
The project Listening at Pungwe is realized through research and sonic cartographic work and manifests through performative installations, live interventions, location recordings, and radio performances. The project (full title: Listening to a Listening at Pungwe Nights: A conversation between Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri) is a proposition of new publics in the contemporary and a collaborative experiential corpus where we re-listen to the use of voice, language, instruments, bodily movements, and modern technology in the recordings. Listening at Pungwe was created by Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri.