SSC Workshop with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Rachel Beckles Willson

My creative research interests have led me along diverging but entangled paths to write several articles and a book about the oud, to compose music for the oud-and-other-instruments, and to use the oud as a sounding object within experimental musical works. These interests grew out of my earlier, very fraught work on Palestine, and have thus always been politically-charged, resulting in considerable anxiety, and some methodological challenges. In my session I share some of these ongoing challenges and questions. I will reflect on the culture-political affordances and consequences of working as a female musician and researcher in a foreign and predominantly male sphere, and some of the concepts that sometimes help me think through my position (Aubry's “sonic pluralism,” Tuck & Wayne's “incommensurability,” Said's “heterophony,” Hodkinson's “difficult histories” and perhaps more). One of the interests in our discussion will be the ways that work with sound may or may not be distinct from work with words.

Bio
Rachel Beckles Willson is Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) at Leiden University, and Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam. She has a hybrid professional arts practice as multi-instrumentalist, composer and widely-published scholar. Her current research interests lie in composition, ecological justice, relationships with the other-than-human, and DIY sound technologies. These have grown out of earlier work in Hungary and the Middle East on new music, cultural imperialism and decoloniality, the cultural life of musical instruments, and activist work with people on the move.

Sonic Psychogeographies
My talk takes a critical position against cartography and discusses its connections to colonial practices, such as mapmaking and imperial borders. Drawing insights from alternative spatial practices in some of the Global Souths regions and cultures, and from radical-subversive practices in Europe, such as by The Situationists, in this talk I delineate some counter mapping practices and strategies, especially through situated listening and listening walks. Within this discursive context, I describe my artistic research in situated listening and sonic psychogeography, manifest in several of my projects, releases, and publications. In particular, by presenting from my recent projects Co-sounding (2024) and Landing (2023 – 2024), I argue how an unfolding auditory situation keeps acts of listening open, instead of closing it down in the form of a soundscape. Here I take a critical position against soundscaping. I argue that, for a radical artist, it is crucial to perform acts of placemaking through care and empathy in intersubjective listening and recording to trace these emergent situations in the form of personal narratives.

Bio
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces large-scale installations and live performances addressing issues of environment and ecology, migration, race, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented across the globe. Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in artistic research, media theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Art and Design Basel, and a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen.