What are the politics of listening? What is the role of the ear in framing histories of protest and performance? Writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei and Performa cordially invite you to join us at a keynote in the form of an experiment in listening. 

Founder of the international sonic archive, Echolocution, Chude-Sokei will interweave his critical work and auto-biographical experiences with his long engagement with the politics of listening, as part of an ongoing exploration of the role of sonic ecologies in shaping contemporary culture. Drawing from “Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention,” a two year project in which he gathered an international group of artists, thinkers, musicians, and scholars as a collective aimed at re-sonifying the ruins of the former Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Chude-Sokei will share tracks and field recordings featuring Kurdisani singer and activist Hani Mojtahedy, Armenian scholar and violinist Gascia Ouzounian, African American artists Mendi and Keith Obadike, as well as German artist/musician Jan St. Werner, all for whom sonic politics activate space and history in order to imagine and generate inter-relational futures.