5 Video Clips from Argentina: Female Empowerment

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The pandemic-driven lockdowns have worsened the conditions for those who share a household with abusers. Since March 2020, there have been 368 femicides in Argentina and a lot of transfemicides that are not as accurately recorded, making the situation even worse. What’s most disturbing, though, is that in a lot of cases the murderers had already been reported to the police by the victim, several times.

What does this say about the ability of institutions and politicians to listen? It would seem as if our system was deaf, but I don’t consider that to be true; we cannot underestimate the meaning of silence coming from the people who should give an answer and protect us. So, as we say here, «my friends take care of me, not the police». That’s why I wrote about the lyrics and sometimes the video's visuals & context, but not about what's explored sonically. I wonder if there are aspects that peak YOUR ear, that draw your attention. Thanks for listening.

Music: Las tesis
Track: «Un violador en tu camino» («A Rapist in Your Path») (Chile, 2019)

Las tesis is a collective of four women from Valparaíso, Chile. Their goal as activists is to put feminist agendas and theories into action, to use them as forms of protest in the streets. This chant, or shall I say anthem, as it has become, is a powerful work that has been performed all over the globe, going viral and showing the potency of taking action in public space. It’s taken from the theories of Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato, which tackle the structural violence of patriarchal capitalism. It was first conducted in Chile in 2019, amidst a wave of protests against the right wing government. The lyrics go:

Patriarchy is our judge
That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you DON’T see
Patriarchy is our judge
That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you CAN see
It’s femicide.
Impunity for my killer.
It’s our disappearance.
It’s rape!
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.

Music: Benjamín Felice
Track: «Exhumo Pun» (Argentina, 2020)

Benjamín Felice is an artist from Tucumán, Argentina. In this piece he explores the ideas of denial, speculation, and fallacies in art and death using an HD walkthrough. This piece is made up of uncertain fragments of a speech that seek to address our most primordial ghosts and to falsify the veracity of objects and images. These ghosts, in my opinion, are connected by simple yet omnipresent experiences: fear of death, of the dark, of loneliness, of the violence we all come from and keep inside as a bloody witness of life and death. (Aren’t musical instruments, in their origins, sacrifices made in order to create order out of chaos? Stretched skin, bones and guts...) This walkthrough shows the power of simulation to make us experience and engage in subjects such as death, sickness, solitude, and uncertainty (the first sign we see in the walkthrough is a graphic joke: grim reaper knocking on a man’s door, saying: «Don’t worry, it’s just a sore throat»).

«Who do you really trust?», reads the first sentence with a lilac background. Can I trust the police? Can I trust my husband, my boyfriend, the judges? No, we can’t, and this I say fully convinced as a shout of anger and nonconformity, because we live with a constant death threat. The video states: «I wonder, who am I to be dead?» Let the dead travel fast and come back as a collective of angry ghosts who’ve fallen victim to these abusers and politically-endorsed murderers.

Music: AGF
Track: «Insisting to remember» (Finland, 2020)

Watch «Insisting to remember» on the website of the collective ⇋ REC-on ↭.

AGF is a feminist-activist-poet-soundartist-teacher-and-friend. Having met her was life-changing for me. We are currently working on a project together, about femicide and social injustice, 13,673 km away from each other. This piece is a tribute to the many murdered women and LGBTQ+ activists from the past years (check her investigation), people who were a potent part of working collectively to speak out and change things together: «This is my lament against the culture of silence», AGF says. Here in Argentina a femicide happens every 29 hours.

Veronica Gago, an Argentinian activist, writer, and political scientiest states in her book The feminist potency, or the desire to change everything: «(...) Listening generates proximity, where the rhythm of thinking also gives a beat to breathing and the gestures of being together». When I first read this phrase from Gago, I immediately remembered something AGF wrote for her album Commissioned Work: «Thanks for listening; listening is a political activity and is the groundwork for justice».

This amazingly simple statement blew my mind: listening is the key to start learning again how to live together. This takes me back to recent events in my country where violence was exerted upon the act listening: from 1976 to 1983, Argentina experienced the worst and most violent military coup in its history, which translated to state terrorism and the systematic «desaparicion de personas».

Imagine it’s 1977 in Argentina and the military have been in power for a year now. Clandestine torture centers are everywhere, and some are purposely not so hidden: there are doors and walls, but neighbors can hear the sounds of horror filling the silence that people have been forced to mantain in order to try to stay out of the regime’s radar. What is this if not a way of sowing fear that leaves no option but to be the recipient of what is imposed through violence? There is NO choice but to listen; a system based on acousmatic repression.

Returning to the present, we can be grateful to each and everyone who has worked so unsparingly to regain the ability to listen; choosing what to listen to and when. This gave us back the chance to listen to the unheard and silenced stories.

Music: Susy Shock y Lola Bhajan
Track: «en San Marcos Sierra» (Argentina, 2018)

Susy Shock calls herself «artista trans sudaca»; she’s a poet, writer, singer, teacher, actress, and more. Lola Bahan introduces herself: «I am an actress, writer, singer, photographer, model, what else.» Both explore the voice as an expression and intersection of subjectivity and collective activism.

These two Argentinian artists join voices to sing a folkloric chant from the Northwest of the country called «Canto con caja» («box singing»). This kind of music actually cuts across borders, since it’s a tradition from all the Andean region, which includes Bolivia, the Andes of Peru, the mountains of Ecuador, Northwestern Argentina, Northern Chile, the Andean region of Colombia, and the Andes of Venezuela. Its characteristic feature is the sound of the drum, which represents the earth, and the voice, which connects to the sky. Its melodies are not well-tempered as other Western music is, and it always carries a kind of spontaneous messiness. It’s a pre-Columbian practice that takes place mostly among women, and it’s part of a collective ritual gathering, a magical moment, a collective foundation of an order that emerges out of the ever-flowing chaotic existence of the universe.

In this video, Lola and Susy’s lyrics talk about the right to feel and share pleasure and to get rid of old religious and cultural impositions regarding love. It was filmed during the vigil of 2018, when the abortion bill was being debated in the Senate. Unfortunately, the law wasn’t sanctioned. But last year, thanks to the tireless work and protests that took place among the intersectional feminist movements, the law was finally passed and we have now expanded our rights to include the voluntary termination of pregnancy.

Music: Violeta Parra (performed by Mercedes Sosa)
Track: «Qué he sacado con quererte» (Argentina, 1993)

This video is older than the rest. Violeta Parra needs no introduction. She embodies the voice of class, feminist, and military coup resistance. She was an artist born in Chile in 1917, and her work ranges from archivism, poetry, composition, instrumental, and plastic arts.

Mercedes Sosa, who performs this beautiful song in the video, was also a key figure in our history and one of the most important figures of Argentine folklore music. She defined herself as a «cantora» rather than «cantante», although both translate as «singer» in English. That meant she was interested in not only the beauty but also with the political duty of having the potential to be heard.

She was persecuted and arrested during the military coup in Argentina, her records were forbidden, and she had to go into exile. Her music was considered subversive, a term which the military dictatorship used to name anyone who didn’t support the regime or spoke against it. Mercedes was a popular voice of resistance through her songs and she was part of the Communist Party, which was more than enough to pose a threat in the eyes of the violent, murderous authoritarian regime.

Her version of this lament inspired by Mapuchean tradition (a native culture and people from Argentina and Chile), is a beautiful intersection of Violeta Parra’s and her own sensitivity.

Biography

Ailín Grad aka Aylu designs audio spaces from Buenos Aires and is mostly known for potent psychotropic juke and footwork experiments. Aylu takes ordinary objects and sounds and pieces them together into electro-acoustic systems: slender gears feathering in complex geometries. Aylu’s works are a small system of electroacoustic pieces. Gears, geometries, instruments, and designs of a fuzzy and unexpected space. She tries to explore different materials and their textures, seeking to resignify sounds that belong to our daily listening and to the soundscapes surrounding us.

Links

Lola Baraldi: «How You See Is What You Get» (Norient)

Ganges Baby: «5 Video Clips from Argentinia» (Norient)

Moses Iten: «Perspectives on New Wave Cumbia» (Norient)

Published on July 22, 2021

Last updated on April 02, 2024

Topics

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Protest

Violence

Queer

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5 Video Clips from

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Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks: NFF Essay Collection 2021

Introduction

by Philipp Rhensius

Films can illustrate what it feels like to live in this world. Yet they do not only represent worlds, but also create them – and by that, the subjectivities of the audience. For this new Norient publication, editors Lisa Blanning and Philipp Rhensius commissioned 30 writers from 17 countries to share their thoughts on today’s world through sound and music.

→ Check all articles of this special
→ Download PDF with introduction and table of contents

While the 30 essays offer different perspectives (autofictional, academic i.e.) on different topics (Gender Roles, Sound, Colonialism) they are all connected by one thing: an intense sensory effect, like a «punctum» (Barthes 1981), triggered by one of the 30 films under discussion. Thus, the texts are not so much about as inspired by the films, unraveling narratives about worries, dreams, and hopes in the 21^st century that sometimes seem intensified by the current COVID-19 pandemic – from feminist activism in South American club music scenes to critiques of sound and space design as instruments of (colonial) power.

By juxtaposing very different text styles and diverse perspectives, this publication seeks to be a collage, resisting the urge to universalize difference or create false coherence. Like some of the protagonists in the films – such as the Soundcloud rappers in Crestone, who experiment with new ways of collective living – the texts create positive disorientation to arrive at new, unexpected places of thought. At best, this publication connects the unrelated – and separates the supposedly consistent. For this editorial, the texts are loosely divided into eight blocks, drawing from the Norient Topics 1: Gender Roles, Capitalism, Sound, Colonialism, Spirituality, Protest, Perception, Belonging. In the following, I will briefly outline the essays relating to each topic, in the above order.

Gender Roles

Gender is not naturally given but produced by social and cultural forces. It refers to a social role based on the sex of a person, a mode of power that has been criticized especially by those whose culturally assigned sex and gender do not align, and who are looking for terms and definitions that include, rather than exclude, their individual ways of being. According to the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, «sexuality extends along so many dimensions that aren't well described in terms of the gender of object-choice at all» (Sedgwick 1990, 35).

In her essay «Intersectionality Rules», the writer and activist Luisa Fernanda Uribe addresses the lack of intersectional thinking in the feminist narratives of South American music scenes. Instead of talking «exclusively about representation or identity», she suggests that «we need to build more radical and collective spaces answering questions about our privileges as agents of the music industry, even if we are women from the Global South».

Some men from the Global North are at the center of critique in writer Agata Pyzik’s essay. The female musicians in Uribe’s text attempt to break free from their gender roles; in Anna Gawlita’s film Krzyżoki, about a traditional Easter ritual in a Polish village, Pyzik finds a desire for «id-pol based on nostalgia for the golden days». While, for her, there are good reasons why «masculinity is being challenged by contemporary culture», she also understands how these men try to regain a sense of manhood.

Blurring the limits of gender and questioning a supposedly authentic way of being is an important part of queer thinking. In his essay inspired by the feature film The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo, the musicologist Adam Harper reflects on how «the queer discovery of the authenticity of the inauthentic (and vice versa) has had an incalculable effect on the aesthetics and semiotics of the contemporary world».

Filmstill: «The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo», Javier Polo Gandía, 2020.

Capitalism

Categorizing has always been a modus operandi of capitalism, a system that tends to subordinate material and immaterial things to profit. In the field of cultural labor, the effects of this ideology often lead to precarity. In her essay «An Ode to Imagination», the writer and musician Noëmie Vermoesen describes how creativity is increasingly threatened by the stress and precariousness which is currently intensified by the forces of the pandemic. Inspired by the protagonist of the film Les Contes Du Cockatoo, who refuses to accept the constant pressure to be productive, she calls for a world in which imagination is freed from measurable expectations.

The musician and ethnomusicologist Suhail Yusuf Khan is anything but unproductive. As a celebrated Sarangi player, he is nevertheless forced to self-market constantly. In his text «Blood Is Thinner Than Money» he claims, without glorifying the past, that this need to find ways of generating income, hasn’t always been the case. The genre in which he operates, North Indian classical music, was once predominantly consumed and financed by the upper class.

The seminal New York record store Other Music was once a somewhat egalitarian place, if not a haven for underdogs. In her essay, the writer Emilie Friedlander, who used to frequently buy records there, mourns its recent closing as «another casualty of the internet».

While the war against algorithms in the music world could be called gentrification of the digital, André Santos sees the decay of the legendary Portuguese music style fado in Lisbon as a result of physical gentrification. In his reflection on these transformational moments in his hometown, he is left with a mix of sadness and nostalgia, but also hope.

A more positive affirmation of place often lies at the heart of club music scenes, although capitalism’s tendency to universalize has paved the way for a widespread commodification of techno and house by white Europeans. In her reflection on Tedra Wilson’s documentary, Dark City Beneath the Beat, writer (and co-editor of this volume) Lisa Blanning shows how Baltimore Club kept its highly localized aesthetics, demonstrating the richness of Black club music in the 21^st century.

Filmstill: «Dark City Beneath the Beat», TT the Artist, 2020.

Sound

Sound is always there even if not recognized. It can expose the world that lies beneath its visibility. However, in a world in which what one sees often seems to be more important than what one hears, it is no surprise that sound still plays a marginalized role in Western society, while sight is privileged as the most valuable source of knowledge – as indicated by many scholars in the field of Sound Studies (e.g. Hirschkind 2012, 63).2

This might also be why the sonic layer of films often goes unnoticed, as the journalist Alaka Sahani points out in her essay «Is the Pandemic a Heyday for Unsung Heroes?». Here, she claims that films are very often celebrated for their protagonists, and less for the people who are responsible for the actual audiovisual experience. In her text on the documentary The Sound Man Mangesh Desai, she asks if the COVID-19 pandemic could be an opportunity to rethink the inequalities of star-centrism.

When it comes to countering existing hierarchies of perception, noise has often been the first music genre of choice. In her essay «The Poetry of Noises», the journalist Gisela Swaragita describes how, after having been exposed to harsh sounds in the Indonesian noise music scene, she could transform her disgust of the traffic noises penetrating her flat in Jakarta into an aesthetic listening experience – culminating in her «enjoying the humming of my family’s 29-year-old refrigerator».

Be it machinic or naturalistic, sound in film always affects viewers below the level of consciousness. It is a power that «Hollywood converts into box-office cash», as the writer Dan Barrow depicts it in his essay about Midge Costin’s film Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. Instead, he argues for a more open approach to film sound-making: a model that entails sonic freedom.

For the sound artist Joseph Kamaru, sound is a similarly powerful tool. He explains in his text «Hearing Is Believing» how, through his work with field recordings, he gained a greater awareness of an environment that is «shared with other living beings». One such insight: «that trees are naturally conductive and can become antennas, capturing radio signals.»

The unheard and overlooked plays a central role in Rayya Badran’s critical analysis of the film Panoptic, in which director Rana Eid narrates her memories of her father, a former general in the Lebanese army. In this essay, the writer unpicks how Eid’s use of sound often contrasts with the images such as the basement of the Beau Rivage Hotel, which was a former torture prison for the Syrian secret service. According to Badran, the audience is invited to learn about the often hidden dark side of Lebanon’s history through listening: a kind of perception that might make one more attuned to the socio-political reality prior to the nationwide protests on October 17, 2019.

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Colonialism

The philosopher Sylvia Wynter analyses the multiple facets of colonialism’s legacy through a central narrative. According to her, any struggle concerning race, class, gender or sexual orientation is a facet of the central «ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle» (Wynter 2003, 260).

An often overlooked aspect in ongoing debates about decolonization is its representation through notions of landscape. In her essay «The Racialized Gaze on Landscapes», the writer and researcher Chandra Frank reflects upon the hailing of the countryside as an idyllic place. As «the countryside has long played an important part in the construction of belonging and nationhood», it has, in the U.K., become «synonymous with white national English identity» that seems to be haunted by colonialism. Frank calls for a reexamination of colonial histories, as with the current efforts to remove colonial statues in South Africa, the U.K. and the USA.

Universalism, as an idea related to colonialism, often sought to subsume the diversity of being and living under a single, Western perspective, often called reason. In her essay inspired by the film Contradict, the scholar Grace Takyi explains that everyday life in Ghana is widely ruled by the Christian religion. For her, the artists portrayed in the film revolt against this religion’s tendency to dominate people’s histories – by writing their own.

Effective acts of decolonization, however, need to be sensitive, especially with questions of representation. In her essay on Felix Blume’s Curupira, Creature of the Woods, the scholar Patricia Jäggi raises questions about the film’s portrayal of Native Amazon communities. She asks: «Is Blume really able to break with the ‹colonial gaze› that defines the white person as an observer and the natives as observed – by having them look back?»

Filmstill: «A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message», Rhea Storr, 2018.

Spirituality

In the context of this colonial heritage, the case of the Utapishi ritual in Kenya seems to show the other sideof the coin. According to the Kenyan artist Kamwangi Njue, the ban of the ritual as a non-religious act of spirituality3 goes back to the British colonial authorities’ introduction of the «Witchcraft Act» in 1925. Cynically, in the ongoing process of the marginalization of this ritual – a kind of mental purification by a specially trained healer, embodied by Jackson Matiere in the speculative short film Tapi! – the role of money creeps in again. After a court hearing with the county pastor, Matiere is no longer allowed to officially practice his ritual – but is still allowed to do the associated dance, as it benefits tourism.

Similarly, invisible forces are floating around in the experimental essay by writer and director Azin Feizabadi, who assesses the myth and legacy of one of Iran’s most beloved singer/songwriters, Ebrahim Monsefi. Monsefi, Feizabadi writes, «cannot be described in one sentence, one film, or one book. He might breeze into you or not. If he does, you’ll feel it – you’ll understand his pain and sorrow, humor, lovesickness, or strangeness.»

Protest

Sorrow and pain have always been important drivers for protest, be it politically explicit or implicit in the personal or private realm. The latter form is expressed by the musicians in the film Her Bijî Granî. As players of the energetic Kurdish wedding music style granî, they could be seen as part of protest culture. In his essay, the scholar Martin Stokes dissects the significant political meanings in songs about love that are usually seen as apolitical.

Very explicit, by contrast, is the effort of musicians facing the aftermath of the Islamist invasion of Northern Mali in 2012, during which music was widely banned. In his text about the film It Must Make Peace, journalist Simon Broughton describes their musical practice as a search for peace and freedom.

While these musicians are fighting for freedom in the literal sense, Alex Freiheit's struggle is more subtle, embodied in gestures that are exemplified in RRRKRTA’s essay «Static Resistance». In the film SIKSA: Stabat Mater Dolorosa, Freiheit, frontwoman of the Polish band SIKSA, addresses political categories such as family, church, and state through childhood memories of socially accepted violence, in a way that is not confrontational, but intimate.

Perception

To think, to listen, to see, to be in the world is always a matter of the body. One cannot separate oneself from one’s perception of the world. According to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, «we must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive» (Merleau-Ponty 1958, 18). Perceiving another body through close proximity, intimacy, is a mode of being that has undergone a radical change since the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing. Since then, it seems, intimacy has been happening mostly online, transforming its conditions from those of trust into those of isolation.

In her reflection on the docu-fiction Crestone, in which a group of SoundCloud rappers oscillate between their isolated online selves and the search for new meaning in life, the curator Daniela Seitz proclaims the need to «look beyond the apparent narcissism of online culture, and the blurred line between the virtual and real.» She reminds us that «it is more important than ever to unlearn established modes of online behavior, and reflect on how the internet echoes existing systems of oppression.»

The idea of showing weakness as a strategy to counter the frictionless online self resonates with Florence Jimenez Otto’s critical reflection on perfectionism. According to Otto, a creative coach who has worked in the music industry for years, perfectionism can be a real threat to mental and physical health. To overcome the faulty logic of self-judgment, she calls for a different perception of the self: a personality that is soft and permeable, «and less narrow-minded and rigid».

Enriching the world with different forms of being and doing is at the core of the essay by writer (and Norient editor) Philipp Rhensius. In describing Eden Tinto Collins’ short film about the artist Amanda Baggs, a genderless nonverbal person with autism, Rhensius claims that communication goes far beyond the verbal. According to him, «silencing other people’s communication is an attempt to defend a world that is prefabricated and based on representation, against one that is in a constant state of becoming.»

Similarly fragmented is the structure of the film Dazzle Lights. According to the writer Lola Baraldi, the viewer is confronted here with a radical blurring of images and thoughts. As the experimental shamanic cumbia band Los Síquicos Litoraleños calls «for alternative ways to illustrate their antics, the documentary finds ways to adapt and innovate by blurring the separation between form and content, allowing a more authentic world-building that reflects surrealism, fascination, and confusion.»

Camille Degeye’s Journey Through a Body likewise seems to mirror the creative methods of the musician it portrays. The film’s contrasting of the romantic with the banal leads writer and artist Steph Kretowicz to ask in which ways the protagonist’s daily routines are harnessed by the messiness of his «creation and the diverse technological ecology it draws from.»

Filmstill: «Crestone», Marnie Ellen Hertzler, 2020.

Belonging

People are not just attached to their family or the nations they live or were born in, but to things, feelings, sounds, and like-minded people across the globe. Yet the pandemic has laid bare how capitalist hyper-individualism has led to a crisis of collectivity, and therefore of a sense of belonging.

Ferry Heijne, frontman of Dutch band De Kift, attempts to overcome this crisis by writing new songs. According to the writer Angus Finlayson (who also copy-edited this collection), «he seeks out moments of human connection; confronted with individualized suffering, he offers comforting universals.»

Less universal and more particular is the search for belonging in the film Don’t Rush, a portrayal of two young men with a passion for rebetiko, the Greek urban folk music made by refugees. Musing on what is now viewed as a rich cultural tradition started by outcasts and illegals with a penchant for hashish, the writer Clive Bell teases out a telling lesson for an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

To belong often means to be able to communicate. In his essay inspired by the film In Your Eyes, I See My Country, in which two Israeli musicians travel to Morocco, the scholar Keith Kahn-Harris observes that lacking a common language is not always an obstacle to communication but «can offer its own insights.» It can help to build new connections without preconceptions.

History is not just about what happened but also what might have happened. It might only take a newperspective to change a biography. Aysel Özdilek reflects on this fact – that any unfolding plot might be an invitation to consider other outcomes – in her essay about the Turkish composer İlhan Mimaroğlu. After watching the film Mimaroğlu: Robinson of Manhattan Island, the writer reads his life as a «waiting room of possibilities, where the past, becoming virtual, continues to have an impact on our current situation.»

1. Norient tells new stories about the world through music, sound, and noise from multiple perspectives and positions. To navigate through the vast range of issues in our essays, podcasts and films, these stories are structured by the Norient Topics, attempting to create collages rather than organic wholes. These Topics are not fixed entities, but change and mutate constantly according to the stories told.
2. While Sound Studies researches sound as a multilayered field of epistemology and knowledge, it nevertheless acknowledges the inter-sensory nature of human experience.
3. The term spirituality is defined as «the quality that involves deep feelings and beliefs of a religious nature, rather than the physical parts of life» (Cambridge Dictionary). Yet, spirituality can also be non-religious. According to Courtney Bender and Ann Taves, it «can be marshaled by atheists and secularists to mark their own pursuits and goals» (Bender and Taves 2012, 6).

List of References

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York City: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc.

Bender, Courtney, and Ann Taves. 2012. What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2012. «Cassette-Sermons, Aural Modernities and the Islamic Revival in Cairo Audition in Contemporary Egypt». In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne. 54–69. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1958. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. «Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom. Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument». The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.

This introduction is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

Biography

Philipp Rhensius is an editor for Norient, writer, musician, sound artist, sociologist & musicologist, and curator from Berlin. His work investigates the connections between the micro- and macro-political and is driven by the idea that «feeling the chains» is the moment when emancipation begins. His music and sound art projects (Kl.ne, aphtc, Alienationst) merge sonic fiction with sardonic poetry and visceral sound. His texts are published in i.e. Taz, Spex, FAZ, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, WOZ and several book volumes. He runs the music label Arcane Patterns and hosts a monthly podcast on Noods Radio. Follow him on Instagram, his Website, or LinkedIn.

Links

See all essays of this special

Download PDF with introduction and table of contents

Published on September 02, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Belonging

Capitalism

Colonialism

Gender

Protest

Sound

Perception

All Topics

Specials

Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks

Norient Film Festival NFF 10 (2021)

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5 Video Clips from Ghana 2021: Music With Attitude

Playlist

by Mutombo da Poet

Ghana has a budding music scene with many talented artists. Over the past ten years, many of them are doing great with little or no support. The government of Ghana has failed when it comes to supporting artists, especially musicians. Even though there is a Ministry meant to support this form of art, little or nothing is done. This however, isn’t stopping these musicians from creating – and churning out greatness. Here are five video clips from Ghana from five amazing musicians you should know about.

Musician: Akan
Director: Yaw Skyface
Track: Me Sika Aduro

In the opening line of this song, Akan raps «God used sand to create man, but man couldn’t stand afterwards, so God mixed some money with the sand and man was able to finally stand». This song is about money and Akan talks about how bad he needs money. Money propels the world and one can’t simply live without it. In the video, Akan receives ‹prayers› from a pastor who seems to be possessed. He then transitions into a world where he gets all the gold, money, clothes, and women he wants. What I love about this video is the minimalistic approach that was beautifully executed. Akan raps in a dialect called Twi and he is a master of this language.

Musician: Wiyaala
Director: Wiyaala
Track: Wisii (The Sun God)

Wiyaala is a bold, fierce, and talented artist. She hails from the Northern part of Ghana (Upper West Region) and proudly carries her hometown, region, and country on her back. Wisii is a song of hope, but I love this video because of how Wiyaala ‹sells› her hometown once again: From the smocks that the young boys wear to the artist’s hairstyle, and how the beautiful women dress and carry their babies. The melody of the song is lovely and it’s easy to sing along. Wiyaala has many great videos but this one always gets my attention because of the characters, the location of the video, and the melody.

Musician: Amaarae
Director: David Nicol Sey of North Production
Track: Fancy

Amaarae is quite new on the scene and has been dropping some amazing videos over the years. This young musician has defied the norm in Ghana and empowered women to be themselves through her music and videos. She is all about women’s empowerment and encourages people, especially women, to be expressive. From the car to her clothes and the set design, this video is truly fancy and the director did a great job with it.

Musician: Wanlov
Director: Fotombo
Track: My Toto

This video went viral in Nigeria and Ghana when it was released. It’s a very low-budget video but it grabs your attention and that is one thing I love about it. For years, women have been objectified in music videos, so it is quite new and very interesting to see a man play ‹the role› of the woman in this video. I honestly want to see many videos like this, I want to see videos where gender roles are switched.

Musician: Sister Deborah and Wanlov the Kubolor
Director: Wanlov Kubolor Cini
Track: RefuseReuseRecylce

This one is more about the message of the video rather than the video itself for me. Plastic pollution has been a global problem for some time now and several people have called for or are working towards the ban on plastics, but in Ghana the government is not even addressing the plastic problem. It’s not even on the table for discussion. Gutters are choked, the ocean is packed with plastics, and little or no work is being done to curtail this. When it rains, there is flooding because of plastics. It is my wish to see a total ban on single-use plastics in Ghana.

The film «Contradict» by Peter Guyer and Thomas Burkhalter was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This film is available for streaming on demand. Find out more about our streaming offer by clicking on the image below: