Nonsilent Protest
On-air June 07, 2020, 20:00 CET
Cashmere Radio
Nonsilent Protest is the first episode of Haus of Commons. A format that undertakes a collective inquiry into identifying the various current social movements and aims to foster connections between these splintered groups. Nonsilent Protest is an offering: one hour of decompression, a moment to lay your body down to rest, to recharge by sharing our soundwaves and collect the energies boiling underneath your skin. You will hear a conversation between Lou Drago, Pedro Marum and Steph Holl-Trieu, in which we discuss and expose our fraught, ambivalent, incoherent thoughts as we tried to make sense of the situation at the end of April. Our voices are interlaced and interspersed with audio recordings collected by Natalia Domínguez Rangel as part of her series “Acoustic Ecologies”, where she asks people from around the globe to record their cities, towns, villages or neighbourhoods and interpret the way they are listening through the days of social distancing.
Nonsilent meditates on the assertion that we should not and will not remain silent, even if our possibility to be out on the streets, bodies rubbing against each other, ear drums catching vibrations of unknown vocal chords, are heavily restricted. As the sounds we usually hear slowly fade, the noise fermenting in the background first starts to murmur and then begins to roar.
We would like to use our platform, however small it may be, to support the protests and rebellions against systemic racism led by our Black siblings, so while you’re listening, please take a look at the following list of resources:
Black and Brown Businesses in Berlin Google Map By Black and Brown Berlin
Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland - ISD-Bund
Antirassistisch-Interkulturelles Informationszentrum e.V.
Split a donation between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers
Black Revolutionary Texts Google Docs by Alijah Webb
Black Socialists Resource Guide
Against right-wing extremism in Germany:
Amadeu Antonio Stiftung
BREAK THE SILENCE Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh
If you would like to make a local impact:
Berlin Collective Action Nightlife Emergency Fund
Using your voice, if you can’t be out on the street:
Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva
Lou Drago is a Berlin-based artist, curator, writer and radio producer/ DJ. Drago is a founding member of XenoEntities Network Berlin, a collective who focuses their research on queer, gender and feminist studies and their interactions with digital technologies. They curate and produce, Transience, a monthly show on Cashmere Radio. Drago’s recent research is concerned with finding ways to coalesce all of those who fail or refuse to fit the neoliberal mould in an attempt to reunite what we have witnessed to be an increasingly fractured Left.
Pedro Marum is an artist, curator, writer and DJ based in Berlin. In their practice marum explores the relation of digital technologies in gender, queer and feminist politics, having particularly focused on cybernetics, surveillance and capture technologies, clubbing culture and alien-phenomenology. Marum is a founding member of XenoEntities Network and as a DJ, founding member of party collective Mina and head of music label Suspension, they are deeply involved in creating queer safe spaces of rave, focusing on raves as spaces for ecstatic collectivity and to practice politics of care.
Natalia Domínguez Rangel is a sound artist and music composer, currently living and working between Amsterdam and Vienna. Her work connects architecture, in situ installations, acoustics and technology. She is interested in how sound affects and resonates with an audience physiologically and psychologically, and how space makes us think of time, duration, medium, acoustics and architecture; exploring how sound can be a source of both pain and pleasure.
Nonsilent Protest is is generously supported by Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa and organised by Steph Holl-Trieu on behalf of Ashley Berlin, an independent, non-profit exhibition space founded in 2013. For now, remaining closed to the public in a Hinterhof on Oranienstraße.
