Moritz Buchner of the Forum Transregionale Studien interviewed me about my ideas and experience in the creation of »Echoing Europe – Postcolonial Reverberations«.

On 16-18 May, you premiered a sound performance entitled “Echoing Europe – Postcolonial Reverberations” at the Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Berlin. Could you tell us the background of the project?

Around the same time that we were organizing the “Acoustic Historiographies” conference that I convened at Forum Transregionale Studien last year, Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse contacted me on developing a theatre project based on the research I am doing on colonial sound history. In the performance I am critically examining the colonial history of the sound archives in Berlin and other cities in Europe. As an artistic project, I investigated the historical and theoretical reverberations of these materials as they are circumscribed by the bigger discourses of post/de-colonial histories of sound and media. I engage with these materials to inquire on their aesthetic and affective resonances to today’s global and postmigrant discourse—drawing from the transregional context of Southeast Asia. So, according to Fabian Larsson, the head dramaturg of the theatre, what he found most interesting in this project is the constellation of me being asked by an institution known for postmigrant discourse, financed by the European Heritage Fund, speaking about Prussian Archives now moving into the planned Humboldt-Forum, speaking as scholar of a European university and as a performer trained in the Philippines.

You can read the full interview here.