Sound gives life its color. Speaking shapes the world. Whilst whispering we create a space for love. And whilst screaming we establish a necessary distance. Sound and speaking are political.
The protagonists of the akademie der autodidakten work with sound, with sound techniques, with rhetorical and musical strategies, voices and amplifiers. It is based on trying out, testing, creating one’s own voice, one’s own words at the moment of sending.
Because discourses reflect privileges: Who is speaking? Who is listening? Who has access to which technique? This seems clearly distributed. Here, in Alternative Acts, they determine how their voice sounds, what force it has, what there is to narrate and hear – so that this apparently clear, even monotonous order is shaken up by its own frequency.
The participants of the akademie der autodidakten, led by the sound artist Shanti Suki Osman, have developed sounds that highlight personal and political stories about hopes, fears, the future and memories of young Black women and young women of Color from Berlin. Now they will be presented to the public: the protagonists and producers will present their different voices, sounds and songs in a joint session and weave them into a listening experience.