With their performance The Drum and The Bird at Rewire festival 2025, Forensis and Bill Kouliglas unearth the echoes of colonial violence in Namibia – amplifying erased voices, lost ecologies, and the land’s testimony. A conversation about how sound can make history audible with Celina Abba, Mark Mushiba, and Tobechukwu Onwukeme.
The Drum and the Bird is a multi-sensory performance by Forensis and Bill Kouligas. It takes as its subject Forensis’s ongoing investigation into German colonialism in Namibia. Examining the relationship between lost ecologies and colonial exploitation, the performance combines generative environmental audio, oral testimonies, and spatio-visual modeling to highlight the voices and sounds erased in the wake of rampant colonialism. Looking beyond the human world for answers, the piece pays tribute to the histories and changes witnessed and experienced by the Namibian landscape's flora, fauna, and geology.
[Katía Truijen/Norient]: Part of what makes the performance such an immersive and powerful sonic work is how the different layers of (spatial) audio work together, from the generative environmental audio to the oral testimonies and live performance. How do you translate historical and environmental narratives into sound?
[Forensis/Mark]: The investigation of German genocide in Namibia by Forensis (Forensic Architecture) was our initial point of departure. A lot of the work is based on photographic archive material, skewed by the colonial gaze and seemingly frozen in time. Therefore it was important for us to work at least in our research to produce counter-images for a genocide that seems too distant in memory and lacks the contemporary persuasions that video offers. The sound work The Drum and the Bird continues this methodology by trying to make audible what cannot be seen or experienced due to the limitations of the source material. We assembled and translated different source material – archival photographs and indigenous oral testimony – to add visceral qualities to the loss and dispossession felt by our partner communities of the OvaHerero and Nama. The sonic layers of the performance became the voices of human and non-human actors such as ocean, bush, wind, rock, and sometimes absences as they guided us to telling the story of the history of colonial environmental violence in Namibia.
[KT/Norient]: Noise seems to operate on many levels in the performance. At one point, one hears the future noise of the hydrogen plant that is planned for the area, and that will make the oral testimonies of the descendants of the Herero and Nama people inaudible. What role does noise play in the performance?
[F/Celina]: Noise in the performance acts as a dual force that symbolizes the ongoing colonial violence (an agent of erasure) and on the other hand is also a call to listen deeply. It acted as the medium that was silencing the Herero and Nama voices, as the future noise of the hydrogen plant threatens to drown out their oral testimonies, echoing the historical violence of genocide and land dispossession. Yet, noise also becomes the medium through which the land speaks, its ever-changing soundscape, the open grasslands to the dense bush. The duality challenges us to listen not only to the noise itself but to what it signifies, the ongoing struggles of the Herero and Nama, and the land’s (not so) silent calls. In this way noise becomes a call to action.
[F/Tobechukwu]: Noise is the medium by which the polyphony of dispossessions (material, and immaterial) are engaged by the German Colonial Continuum Ensemble. The Cargo Port expansion planned for Shark Island, and its fleet, or «Noise Ensemble» of diesel engine vehicles will dispossess the Nama and Herero of the Atlantic winds/air by which their songs and national anthems travel. Another layer stacked on top of the already existing modes of dispossession in Namibia today. The chord intervals played on the trumpet are a constellation of perfect 5th and minor 3rd chord intervals, functionally coupled as anthemic and remembrance frequencies. A new methodology in computational acoustics we are currently developing in-house looks to elaborate further on this in support of efforts to halt the port expansion.
[Philipp Rhensius/Norient]: How do you decide which sounds or voices to amplify?
[F/Mark]: Part of the compositional thinking was informed by dub theory, accentuating absences and relying on the deeb base and reverb to be more felt than heard. This form of sound design provided a base for our digital sounds which are a mix of ambient and computational sound. Further added to this are human and non-human sounds. Human voices of course are the most prominent because they are the most intelligible – however, we routinely process them together with environmental or elemental sounds to complicate human and non-human relationships. Like in the environmental section where the wind and human testimony merge to create a polyphony. These do not compete so much, compared to an industrial sonic presence that is meant to represent colonialism and its afterlives.
[KT/Norient]: A recurring question in the performance is «what is the price of colonial amnesia». It examines a form of memory activism and seems to emphasize how colonial histories are entangled with ongoing acts of colonial violence in different territories. How do you navigate the ethical responsibility of representing histories and voices tied to colonial violence?
[F/Mark]: This work, like our investigations, was prepared with the guidance of our partners who believe in artistic endeavors to represent this important history.
[KT/Norient]: You explore testimonies from flora, fauna, and geology. What challenges arise in giving «voice» to entities that do not speak in traditional human terms?
[F/Mark]: A challenge we had was experiencing the limitations of Western sense-making when working with indigenous cosmologies, how indigenous cultures in Namibia think about being in the world. This meant learning to be attuned to the testimonies of loss beyond what much of science has been able to prove. We let ourselves be guided by indigenous sensibilities because this is a genocide that in much part has been told by the perpetrators of colonial crimes. The archives were pretty dense and presented a heavily German influence in terms of language but also organization. Knowledge is organized and labeled sometimes in colonial systems and the guidance of our partners helped to read a decolonial semantic back into the evidence. Of course we also dealing with the challenge of mapping out a genocide that happened a 130 years ago and environmental violence that starts before the first satellite photos became available.
[PR/Norient]: What is, for you, the relationship of sound and truth?
[F/Mark]: I don’t know if I would necessarily relate sound with truth, for me truth is a kind of futurity, a kind of notion that organizes a world-view and sound can be a building block for a certain world-view, at least in our case, a decolonial world-view. Sound has a universality in communication because it is registered by part of our senses that are less cognitive in nature. This for me is interesting because its sensorial and physical qualities can achieve things beyond just rhetoric and clever language.
[F/Celina]: For me, truth, as a vibrational and affective medium, becomes a way to access truths that are often excluded from human-dominated narratives. Truth and sound challenge this perception, as truth is embedded in the land, embedded in the non-human beings, and embedded in the material of the world itself. The truth in Hatsamas is heard from the changing soundscape of the land. The wind’s altered acoustic signature has changed due to environmental degradation. Through sonification, it reveals ecological truths that transcend human language and visual documentation.
