Listening Nearby

CG: We met in Berlin in 2021 when Julia Lübbecke and I invited you to our radio show for Goldrausch’s¹ closing exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. At that time, we also talked about voice, especially in relation to the title of the exhibition, “Sirens.” It’s great to be in conversation with you again!

Your book I Speak Radio² has just been published. It comes in both print and e-book format. It’s remarkable how you could feature actual sounds in the e-book. How did you feel about working in the different formats? And did that effect the scores?

AB: I am primarily interested in how precariously we human beings articulate ourselves in speech and how our articulation is dependent on context and environment. So, for example, I created a ten-part radio work, A Voice Exists in Voicing, for Manifesta 14 Prishtina, which I recorded mainly in Kosovo’s streets, cafés, cinemas, and gardens. While walking, my Kosovar interlocutors tell me about their lives, which have been affected by anti-Muslim violence, but also about their coping practices, which result in a remarkable culture. This work is the book’s centerpiece—in the form of a revised, transcribed version. The book provides a longer time frame—after all, reading requires more time than listening to the pieces. Plus, a different space because it is a pocket-sized paperback that can be taken along on walks by readers. They will read it in places whose sounds blend with the sounds contained in the book.

My second piece in the book also gave it its title: I Speak Radio. This programmatic sentence was written by the actress Dora Dery in 1928 regarding her feminist radio practice. She produced radio talks on fashion, work, and emancipatory relationships in Berlin. When the Nazi regime came to power, her radio show disappeared, and so did any trace of her. Finding her sentence in a book by radio scholar Kate Lacey, I felt compelled to honor her with a sonic-visual speculation that both historicizes and reimagines Dora Dery’s and other 1920s radio feminists’ radio practices. I Speak Radio is as programmatic as it is self-empowering. Dery is talking about a self-reflective way of speaking that takes listening to the radio into consideration. Being an actress, she is, of course, aware that spoken words are shaped by affecting intonations and that these take time. There are sounds of mourning, of being offended or amused. Of self-control or of losing one’s temper. Of chewing. Of struggling for words. Of lapsing into silence.

These can, of course, also be heard in A Voice Exists in Voicing. I edited the transcripts of the two very different pieces with the aim of making the temporality and the self-empowerment of this radio speaking in the book a sensual experience. I felt that it was crucial to transform them into dense, poetic essays. Into more-than-transcripts and more-than-scores but also into a composition in its own right that transports the sensual poetics of the sounds, voices, intonation, layering, ruptures… Of the slow, non-linear, informal paths that the sonic walks, stories, or tirades perform.

I experienced the process of transcribing as a slowed-down, fractured listening process that allowed me to make decisions regarding the sound of the texts.

Then there is the visual material in the book: drawings by Michael Fesca for A Voice Exists in Voicing, as well as archival photographs, that I have overdrawn and rearranged, which the aural level of I Speak Radio latches onto.

CG: To publish the book, you decided to work with Scriptings—a publishing project that visual artist Achim Lengerer initiated in 2009. How did your collaboration shape the process?

AB: With complex material like this, it became a matter of choosing a supportive and experienced publisher dealing with wayward composites. Ideally, I wanted someone with a strong conceptual approach. Achim’s publishing practice is committed to performative script writing, which is informed by political debates, and its “in-between performative modes of language,” to say it in his own words. His cooperation with artists, theoreticians, writers, and activists yielded not only books but also notebooks and loose-leave collections. Achim was especially interested in how my radio practice (I’m the host of a monthly radio show at reboot.fm in Berlin) diffuses into my artistic works and into my essayistic one (I contribute to debates on sonic practices of radio collectives that derive from protest groups/scenes).

Achim has worked with the artist Anita di Bianco. She became a trusted collaborator in the process of reworking the texts. And it seemed only natural that Michael Fesca, who knows my work at heart, should co-edit the book. During the final stages of the process, I had the support of Janine Sack, an experienced e-publisher. In her longstanding artistic and design practice, she has developed a particular affinity for intermediality. The smoothly flowing artists’ books that she publishes under EECLECTIC often contain moving images or sound and set completely new standards within this medium.

At first sight, it might seem like a book is a silent medium. But it could also be considered a medium for imagined sounds and intonations. Like sound, books are time-based. Think of the temporality of reading and paging. It depends on how you want to involve yourself, how much time you reserved for the company of a book, which sonic environment you choose to read in. The e-pub basically works the same way. Just that you can read and be accompanied by voices and sounds for a few paragraphs. And it contains conversations that expand the printed book.

CG: Let’s circle back to “A Voice Exists in Voicing,” which you mentioned as the centerpiece of the book. How did you produce this piece?

AB: In the winter of 2021, Catherine Nichols, curator of Manifesta 14, invited me to develop an artistic contribution to open Radio Otherwise—a time-based venue of the biennale in the ether. Radio Otherwise was based at the Centre for Narrative Practice, which moved into the run-down and then beautifully renovated Hivzi Sylejmani Library³. Each room in the Centre for Narrative Practice could be accessed via the garden, including the broadcast studio hosting my work. Apart from the work’s description, I did not add any visual elements simply because radio is based on an acousmatic mode, transmitting voices and sounds into the widest variety of quotidian situations without visual reference to their bodies.

When Catherine contacted me, we discussed my experiments with radio speech in motion and arrived at the concept of radiophonic walks. The July heat wave began as Manifesta opened. Like every year, the Kosovo-Albanian diaspora, which consists of several waves of migration caused by repression and war, used the summer holidays to travel to their family members who have remained in Kosovo. However, my interlocutors belong to those who continued to live in Kosovo. After long years of repression and war, their mobility was restricted because the EU did not recognize their nationality and passport at the time. Yet their articulations could travel through the airwaves and the internet.

Together with them, who know Kosovo like the back of their hand, and equipped with my mobile recording device, I roamed the streets, parks, cinemas, and cafés. My ear keeps walking, my foot listens. We took our listeners to sites that were once important and have since fallen victim to repression, war, or the dismantling of public space: to municipal cinemas and theaters, to a rock festival, to a queer club that no longer exists, to the Roma mahallas, a Serbian enclave, or to a restaurant situated in a space that used to be a library. Coming from various generations and social backgrounds, they talked about how they cope with their traumatic experiences. At times, there is anger, and a tirade erupts.

Before I took the actual recordings, I made research recordings. A couple of months before the exhibition opened, the streets of Prishtina were quite empty. It was cold and dark. Donjetë Murati, my production coordinator, along with Simon Kurti and Rreze Kurteshi from the Manifesta office, arranged a series of visits to important initiatives, including the queer Dylberizm platform, the lesbo-feminist collective of Foundation 17, the self-organized cultural space Termokiss, or the art space Akvarijus in a city inhabited by Kosovo Serbs, to name just a few. Everyone was very generous and referred me to other initiatives—for example to the emancipatory animation festival Anibar in Peja.

The final nine recordings include interconnected voices and themes. They open up different listening paths, they rub up against each other. They enable the listener to connect with them—with their chosen narrative dramaturgy, as well as their breathing, gulping, and intermittent lapses of speech.

Where their physical condition would allow, I met with my conversation partners on urban or rural streets or secret paths. What was said was literally shaken, and thoughts were punctuated by unpredictable background noise. Searching for pathways and words, the captured voices traced their experiences of repression. Both the voicings and the production, as a whole, contain some deeply unsettling moments. One of my conversation partners, the trans rights activist Anna Kolukaj, sadly ended her own life on the opening night of Manifesta⁴. Her parents had her buried as male. They forbade the use of her articulations as a female. I gave my audio recordings of her to her queer family of friends, who played them at their own mourning ceremony for Anna.

CG: In terms of “giving voice,” you have mentioned elsewhere that you take inspiration from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about.” Can you talk about how you used this concept linked to documentary cinema in your work?

AB: Working with voices and interlocutors, I am well aware of the underlying complex politics. It was certainly intentional that Anna decided to die on the opening night of Manifesta. I see it as an articulation, as a reaction to the distribution of power inherent in such art contexts. I certainly can’t exclude myself from this; after all, I came to Kosovo as one of the so-called Internationals of the Manifesta Biennale. And I have a certain amount of leeway, albeit limited. Like reconvening with my interlocutors for the book to involve them in the changes to their articulations in the book version. For example, they wrote footnotes dedicated to family members and friends no longer alive.

All the same, the book also conveys my sonic practice, which is decentralizing and compositional. And this is where the connection to Trinh T. Minh-ha comes in. Trinh has been thinking about such a multi-layered positioning as an artist working with many voices since the 1980s. Her films and texts have long accompanied my artistic thinking. She provides philosophical and poetic approaches to themes such as voice, gesture, normativity, memory, and colonized space.

Trinh’s experimental film practice, in which she seeks to decentralize the documentary, employs a nonlinear way of observing, for which she coined the term “speaking nearby.” Among other things, she reflects on this in her important book Woman, Native, Other:

“My sympathies and grudges appear at the same time familiar and unfamiliar to me; I dwell in them, they dwell in me, and we dwell in each other, more as guest than as owner. My story, no doubt, is me, but it is also, no doubt, older than me. Younger than me, older than the humanized.”⁵

She describes self-empowerment through voicing. Trinh argues it takes the possibility of articulation for a voice to be acquired and for that voice to have agency. Hence, any interviewer is always already political. As I am the interviewer in this work, this made me think of my own becoming Western after 1989 and my current EU privileges: my internationally recognized West German passport and my Anglophone surname. I speak about that in the prelude, which takes 1989 as its point of departure. While my nineties maneuvered me and my GDR teenage environment into the so-called West, my interlocutors in Kosovo experienced a kind of frozen time. Kaltrina Krasniqi, Toton Pllana and Miliana Dundjerin speak of a lost decade in a forcibly deprived region in which, at best, human rights activists and international NGOs were interested. That is also something they talk about—in their own English.

CG: You also incorporate background sounds into the text using a different typeface. It’s important not to isolate the sound from its context completely. You mention that sound and listening have functioned to produce and enforce social hierarchies. Can you elaborate on this?

AB: Although the font and color used to indicate sounds separate them from speech, these sounds are given the same value and their plane of signification—as an essential sensory level that situates the act of speaking and talking. Engines rattle and clatter all around us; our conversation is broken by an insanely loud shawm, and we keep coming across car radios. All of which is telling of social asymmetries and hierarchies.

Growing up, I saw my parents in the steel factory with their hard helmets and ear protection. This is also a sound reality. From the perspective of BPOCs, we can understand their experience of sound and noise in the context of the intergenerational trauma of enslavement. This is touched on in the essays by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman. Gloria Anzaldúa recalls the shameful experience of listening to Chicana radio broadcasts. Jennifer Lynn Stoever discusses the violence of the early phonograph, which was used, for example, for ethnographic sound recordings. At the beginning of the last century, German scientists near Berlin—in Brandenburg prisoner-of-war camps—used phonographs to research the language and music of people who were forcibly denied the return to their families in the southern hemisphere of our planet. This is an example of how listening, even when it does not exercise active, intervening violence, is embedded in coloniality and other violence-based techniques of governance. The silenced voices of the independent feminist radio producers in Berlin in the 1920s are also a testament to this. I hope there will be more critical debate around this. Is there perhaps, to continue Trinh’s train of thought, also a listening nearby? Books help us to think about this more. And certainly, your High Pitch Magazine, too!