Matana Roberts – “Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic”
TX: Saturday, 12th April – 12:00 – 12:30pm / Monday, 14th April – 6:00 – 6:30pm BST
How can you use the art of sound to make painful memory joyful, without negating the importance of painful experience? What is myth? What is awe? How can you honor, yet document the unknown? Where do the personal, cultural, emotional politics collide in a rendering of sonicity? What does it mean to endure?
These are questions that currently fascinate me. My current work is focused on collaging experiential process through soundscape exploration, based on unique embodied experiences.
Just before the world shutdown in 2019 I voyaged on an English cargo ship from the United Kingdom to North America. I wanted to know…to embody the motion, movements of not only a history but of a wonder around sounds, memory, what we carry, what we leave behind whether by choice or force.
I carried with me a small “roberts radio”, that refused to work of course, b/c there was no signal. So I kept an audio diary and from that, a series of field recordings, and footage I made during this time, I present to you a radio collage, of a life changing moment for me not only as an artist, but as a person, entitled “Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic…”
Matana Roberts is an internationally celebrated composer, performer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner.
Working across many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, music composition, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre, Roberts is perhaps best known for their acclaimed Coin Coin project – a multi-chapter work of ‘panoramic sound quilting’ mixed media performance work, that aims to expose the mystical roots and intuitive traditions of American creative expression, while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrative, history, community and political expression within sonic structures.
“Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic…” is a co-commission between Kunst zum Hören ORF Ö1 and Radiophrenia.
https://www.matanaroberts.com/
