The Bay Area’s Interdisciplinary Artistic Blueprint
Episode 4 of the TIMEZONES podcast series, co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut. This episode features some of the most forward-thinking contemporary musicians and visual artists currently based in the Bay Area.
There is an unspoken blueprint in the Bay Area arts and music communities allowing artists an organic crossover between practices and languages. A hybridizing of mediums that arises from spaces of deep experimentation. From the Bay Area’s openness and curiosity to the limitations of physical spaces to work and gather in – leading to the creation of multipurpose spaces that host artists across visual art, performance, and music, thus resulting in crossovers.
Each in their unique way, the artists featured in this episode refuse to let one practice define their artistic world nor allow it to create a boundary. Their practices range from composition, music production, and multi-instrument performance to film direction, video art, sculpture, and more. The artists not only discuss how their practices within sonic and visual worlds are shaped by the Bay Area’s social, cultural, and political landscape, but also how they work with the limitations and contradictions that arise as a result of tensions in their artist-place relationship.
A podcast by Lara Sarkissian
Co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut
Featuring: 8ULENTINA / Esra Canoğulları, Nadia Shihab, Sofía Córdova, Khatchadour Khatchadourian, Greekor Greg Nemet
Direction and Production: Lara Sarkissian
Music: Lara Sarkissian
Artistic Editor: Suvani Suri
Project Management: Hannes Liechti
Jingle Voiceover: Nana Akosua Hanson
Jingle Mix: Daniel Jakob
Mastering: Adi Flück, Centraldubs
Artwork: Šejma Fere
→ Full transcript of episode 4
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Featured Artists
8ULENTINA / Esra Canoğulları is the co-founder of Club Chai, an event series, curatorial project, record label, and radio show that hybridizes non-Western sounds with electronic music. 8ULENTINA’s work as a DJ, producer and interdisciplinary artist focuses on creating diasporic spaces through the use of sound, sculpture, garments and video. Their sets include a wide range of BPMs and genres, piecing together varying percussive styles and combining non-Western dance music with club, techno, rap, and R&B. 8ULENTINA’s debut EP EUCALYPTUS was released in February 2018 via Club Chai, their second EP BODYGUARD was released via London-based label TT (fka Tobago Tracks) in March 2019.
Nadia Shihab works across film, collage, and sound and engages with personal and diasporic histories to explore the ways alternative narratives can be found through a rearrangement of fragmented ones. She worked as a community practitioner for over a decade before directing her feature-length debut, Jaddoland, a personal documentary set in her mother Lahib Jaddo’s home in Texas. The film won five festival jury awards, including an IFP Independent Spirit Award in 2020. She was raised in the Texas panhandle by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Sofía Córdova was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1985 and is currently based in Oakland, California. She creates works that consider sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory potential, the internet, colonial contamination, mystical objects, and extinction and mutation as evolution, within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism, and its technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit XUXA SANTAMARIA.
Khatchadour Khatchadourian was born in Lebanon and grew up singing in the Syrian-Armenian children’s choir Karoun for seven years. He credits the beginning of his musical focus on meditative genres to his early years singing in the Armenian Orthodox church. He began playing the duduk, an Armenian woodwind instrument, in 2006. He holds bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Greekor Greg Nemet began his photography in the early 2000s when he moved to the Bay Area from Brooklyn, NY. Greg studied film photography in the final days of the pre-digital era, using the wet process. After leaving SF State, he worked in various areas of the photography industry. From fashion and architecture to event photography and portraiture, Greg spent the latter portion of the 2000s immersed in the Bay Area’s photo and art scene. After the 2008 recession, with gentrification setting in, he ventured into the winemaking world and currently works as the winemaker at his family winery Kareen Wine.
Bonus Talk
The Soul of a City: A TIMEZONES podcast bonus talk with Lara Sarkissian and Khatchadour Khatchadourian about surviving without space in the Bay Area
moderated by Steph Kretowicz
Writer, editor, and journalist Steph Kretowicz talks to sound artist, electronic composer, DJ, and co-founder of Club Chai Lara Sarkissian, along with collaborator and musician Khatchadour Khatchadourian about their TIMEZONES episode. Together, they discuss reflecting the diasporic experience through sound and surviving without space in the Californian tech capital.
Steph Kretowicz is a writer, editor and journalist specialising in music, contemporary art and online culture. Writing appears in Flash Art, Dazed & Confused, Resident Advisor, The Fader, and The Wire, as well as The Guardian, Somesuch Stories, and Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, among others. Kretowicz is co-founder and editor of London-based arts publication AQNB.com, editor and researcher at 3hd Festival, and author of novel and cross-media narrative «Somewhere I’ve Never Been», published by TLTRPreß and Pool in 2017.
Background Articles
Living in Spectrums
by Ruth Gebreyesus
In this essay, our author affirms the region’s interdisciplinary artistic footprint, traces it back to her own biography rooted between cultures and disciplines, and speculates on the fruitful potential of multidisciplinarity for creative processes.
When Culture Nurtures the Tech Industry
by Steph Kretowicz
«The reason why tech workers were attracted to San Francisco was because of everything that the artist class brought to SF», says one of the artists in our TIMEZONES Bay Area episode. An essay on the long and tangled interrelation of art and technology in the region.
Playlist
Explore a playlist of artists featured in the TIMEZONES Bay Area podcast, their collaborators, and their peers in the Bay Area community. curated by Lara Sarkissian
The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies (of life) have been worked up into experimental audio collages.
The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art, and improvisation. The TIMEZONES series endeavours to create new artistic forms of storytelling, listening and exchange across the boundaries of geography, time zones, genres, and practices.
The TIMEZONES podcast series is co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut.
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Published on September 30, 2021
Last updated on October 12, 2023
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