What Happens When History Is Not Only Remembered, but Sounded?

Beginning with the ‘Gate of No Return’, Nortey explores sound as a form of historical memory and the possibility of return.

With the aid of borrowed, adapted and self-invented instruments, as well as through improvisation, breath, feedback and extended techniques, he engages with the stories of displacement, rupture and survival embedded in objects, bodies and cultural practices. Here, feedback is both a technique and a signal which – altered – returns from the system through which it has passed.

The lecture-performance presents improvisation as a historical method through which the past is not merely remembered, but can be encountered in the present. Improvisation refuses to freeze the past; it records what a body does under the weight of its burden, and which burdens it refuses to bear.

Rather than reconstructing the Middle Passage, Nortey asks what sound can reveal about its enduring afterlife, and whether listening itself can become a form of return – return not as a restoration of what was lost, nor as a repetition, but as a relation: as a way of standing in the present in the presence of what remains.

Part of the programme: “A felasophical gathering”

Followed by a concert by The Berlin Afrobeat Company and Santrofi

Safi Faye Hall

A Felasophical Encounter | HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt