#DecolonialFrequencies Festival continues this spring with unexpected encounters and premieres. We also reprise earlier compositions and sound performances. In its second edition, non-hegemonic dialogue takes centerstage. A postmigrant artist’s life is a decolonial act. We invite musicians, sound artists, and performers who meet each other for the first time to share artistic practices, to reverberate their decolonial methods, and to create and compose new works together on the main stage of Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. I only have one curatorial brief: If you do not have to perform or translate yourself to the white gaze and ears, how would your sonic utopia sound like?

This April we invite you to two new premieres: J Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi and Pepe Dayaw come together this week to create Overlapping Waves.

The European continental imperial thinking enfolds the landscape. Hills and valleys are measured, sounds and relationships are calculated. But what if the landscape is mostly water? What if the in-between and liquid life rule? Mo’ong is a composer and instrument maker, Pepe Dayaw is a performer and fashion designer. Both grew up in island countries – Indonesia and the Philippines. Both start from “left-overs” in their art. What is perceived as leftover in the logic of consumption and status becomes new media in their hands: Mo’ong builds instruments and new sounds, Pepe creates dresses, costumes, and performances. With what is there, improvising and experimenting, they leave the ‘standard’ behind to explore new sound bodies and create resonances. The ‘standard’ is an imperial setting, not only in Indonesia and the Philippines. Working with the leftovers is politically resistant, the composition of “left-overs” and their sounds is the search for free space.

Next week, Marque-Lin and Emilio Cordero Checa compose together Unknown Frequencies.

We live in noisy cities. Here the simultaneity of voices prevails. In Unknown Frequencies, Marque-Lin, performance artist, and Emilio Cordero Checa, sound and light designer, examine the political power of noise, and the security within noise–because the opposite of “music” is not silence. It is always the others who make noise. “Music” is a hierarchical system; “Music” is exclusive. “Music” is a boundary. Anything beyond that is “noise”. Noise is undecipherable – yet still recognizable. Noise enters the body before we know what is happening to us. We live in noise. It is the resistance of the unheard.

To see the entire program and to book your tickets, visit: https://ballhausnaunynstrasse.de/events