It’s a contemporary survival technique: one checks websites and articles, in order to create a picture of someone before meeting them. Especially before flying 10,000km to meet a person for the first time, with whom one will publicly perform three days later. But this common practice is risky. After all, these articles and portrayals might be written for commercial, white contexts. Wouldn’t this picture, this optic be distorting? Wouldn’t one miss the real encounter?
The composer, performer and video director, Isabel Gonzalez Toro and the cultural geographer and singer, Anjeline de Dios are coming together for the first time at Ballhaus Naunynstraße. Unprepared. With several years of experience. They create spaces with their own art, open spaces in which the usual hierarchies of judgment and exploitation are suspended for the moment. What they have in common, is that they understand sound as an act of decolonial and feminist power. Because sound doesn’t just exist on its own, it is a shared endeavour. Only who engages with it, will tune in – whilst listening and producing – and be able to move away from the dominant, familiar patterns.
Because what are we actually hearing? The sound? The frequency? Do we hear the body making the sound? Do we hear – in the case of Anjeline de Dios – the family in which she learnt to sing? The classical training? Do we hear our own eardrum and the hollow shape of our body? Do we hear Isabel Gonzalez Toro’s self-taught musical approach? Do we hear the community, in which Anjeline de Dios raises her voice and which is structured by the beats of Isabel Gonzalez Toro? Do we hear the community which she is building for the LatinX diaspora in Berlin? Do we hear the space in which the sound spreads? Or the one created by the sound? With Tuning In To Resonances, Anjeline de Dios and Isabel Gonzalez Toro risk an encounter, in order to be carried away by the sound of the other, into the indefinite, the open, into something that can be determined together.
Anjeline de Dios
Isabel Gonzalez Toro
Premiere: 13-14 May 2022.