Sonic Interventions Season 5 (English)

S5E1 Fabrics of Change

This first episode features multi-disciplinary artist Percy Nii Nortey and curator Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, who collaborated on the group exhibition »Colonial Ghosts – Resistant Spirits« in Berlin's St. Nicholas Church. Learn more about Nortey's dialogue with, and celebration of, the working class in Ghana and how bold fabric and sonic artworks, also by Theresa Weber, challenge and transform post/colonial (church) spaces. Find out more about S5E1 on Podigee.

Credits
Sound installation as part of Break from Reality (2024).

S5E2 Mit und Gegen das Archiv (in German with English Intro)

Audio dramatist Joel Vogel and musician Vincent Bababoutilabo are in conversation with Jan Dammel about their working methods in the research performance monostatosspiegel (2025), on queer movements in 1920s Berlin, and the decolonial audio walk zurückERZÄHLT (2020). The latter centers on acts of resistance by 106 people from the then ›German colonies‹ who worked and lived in Berlin's Treptower Park in the summer of 1896. They speak about their engagement with the (colonial) archive, about the possibilities of using sound to tell a violent history differently, and about how their audiowalk has been bringing people together for five years. Find out more about S5E2 on Podigee.

S5E3 Unlikely Witnesses to History

Artist and researcher Rehema Chachage is in conversation with Jan Dammel about mixed-media installations in Johannesburg, Leipzig and Stade. They discuss Rehema's long-term engagement with her matriline, how songs can serve as »unlikely witnesses to history«, and how the marigold speaks to both colonial uprooting of plants to Tanzania and intergenerational transmissions. Find out more about S5E3 on Podigee.

Credits
Sound installation Avoid/Devoid (2022) by Rehema Chachage and Valerie Asiimwe Amani.
Sound installation as part of Notes on Baking (2022).
Sound installation as part of Where the Ashes Rest, A Single Marigold Bloomed (2025).

S5E4 Echoes between Cameroon and Germany

In the last episode of season 5, Jan Dammel is in conversation with musician and sound artist Elsa M'Bala. They talk about the 2021 performance parcours Eigensinnige Leben in Berlin's Treptower Park, Cameroonian anti-colonial organisers in Berlin during the interwar period, such as Victor Bell, and what it means for Elsa to work with sound archives in European universities and museums. Learn more about her ongoing project Kribi Archives, which makes ethnographic recordings of Cameroonian music accessible in Kribi, and her general investment in creating listening spaces.

The excerpt featured in this episode of the sound piece made by Elsa M'Bala for Eigensinnige Leben in 2021 makes use of the recording »Arbeitslied« (LA 1334), Lautarchiv, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Excerpt of track for second edition of Kribi Archives – listening space, April 2026 by Elsa M'Bala, production: Aurelien Bethuel Tseo Olendja

Moderation and Curation: Jan Dammel
Concept: Dr. Layla Zami
Producer: Eufoniker Audioproduktion