Robert Machiri 

This piece is composed of free improvised music and material from a performance recorded in Recklinghausen, a small town in Germany. As part of an experiential itinerant intervention between the town and Berlin, I attempt to interpret the resonance felt through the town’s labour history as an ex-mining-industrial location. To foreground a dystopian image. The failure for truth to hold capacity when it’s displayed within a cacophonic membrane. When landscape turns into a site for resistance. When time and temporality offer fractality as hope.  This composition assembles elements from a personal music collection; biographically compiled with Zimbabwean liberation songs, African music ethnologically extracted and personal compositions of electronic music. I punctuate this cacophonic mix with other found archival materials. A timeless piece of James Baldwin in conversation with Giovanni that foregrounds ideas on the black family and its losses to historical catastrophes such as industrialisation and slavery. A documentary piece on Henry Ford and his close ally Frederick Taylor- except on scientific management and founder of organisational studies- which zooms in on labour exploitation, its benefits to capitalism and the global geopolitical dynamics involved. 

Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri born in 1978, in Zimbabwe is an artist who works primarily through sound mediation. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; his intuition and a post-disciplinary production of works that draw on discourses that are presented through embodied critique, learning and unlearning, interweaving sound, music and images. His most notable project PUNGWE is a mutable project that circles pan African soundings with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces.

https://listeningatpungwe.wordpress.com

https://www.hoerspielundfeature.de/hoerstueck-ueber-stimmen-aus-afrika-dzimudzangara-spektrale-100.html

https://soundcloud.com/user-799683378/sets/accra-sound-trails