Big Ideas in Art + Culture + Improvisation: meLê yamomo in conversation with Teilhard Paradela
On Thursday, December 1, 2022, the IICSI, Musagetes, the ArtsEverywhere Festival, and CAFKA presented “Big Ideas in Art + Culture + Improvisation: meLê yamomo in conversation with Teilhard Paradela.” This event took place in the Arts Auditorium at the University of Guelph (MacKinnon building, room 113), with the Berlin- and Amsterdam-based curator, scholar, and artist meLê yamomo presenting a performance/lecture on decolonizing sound in conversation with scholar Teilhard Paradela.
In this video performance lecture, titled “…and when I speak, my brown skin and the entire ecology vibrate,” meLê yamomo resounds their philosophy of sound and the sonus—migrating between continents, cultures, artistic practices, and academic disciplines.
The event was recorded in its entirety, and is now available to watch below. You can also download the full transcript of the event (see side bar).
On December 2, yamomo and Paradela offered a full-day workshop to complement this “Big Ideas” talk. This workshop, entitled “Post:Migrant Presences,” allowed 15 participants (8 spots reserved for BIPOC participants) to consider how ‘presence’ constitutes aesthetic experience, and how the aesthetic reshifts how we compose the world. In understanding our movements, mobilities, and presences within social, geographical, and historical spaces, how might our improvisation radically shift history?
MORE ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
meLê yamomo
meLê yamomo lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Metro Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and now inhabits Amsterdam and Berlin researching, teaching, and creating performance/theatre and sound/music. He is Assistant Professor of Performances Studies, Sound Studies, Artistic Research and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, the author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and project leader and principal investigator of the projects »Sonic Entanglements« and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS). meLê is resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê also curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts the Sonic Entanglements podcast.
Teilhard Paradela
Teilhard Paradela (they/them) works as a policy maker, community leader, historian, archivist, and dramaturge. They immigrated from the Philippines to Canada, where they settled (uninvited), studied, worked, and grew up in the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
MORE ABOUT THIS TALK
What lies in between theory and aesthetics? Situatedness and migration? Sounding and listening? Performing and perception? the Universal Self and the Colonial Other? What understandings transpire in imagining beyond social imaginations of racial, national, cultural, gender, or disciplinary borders and boundaries? What knowledges emerge through hearing? How can processes of soundings and listening transform us towards a postmigrant society? In this video performance lecture meLê yamomo resounds their philosophy of sound and the sonus—migrating between continents, cultures, artistic practices, and academic disciplines.
MORE ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP
How can ‘presence’ interrupt dominant aesthetics? How could the inhabiting of the here and now be a revolutionary act? If history is a musical score of modernity or a play script of colonial conquest, how can improvisation be a radical act of decoloniality?
This workshop explores how ‘presence’ constitutes aesthetic experience, and how the aesthetic reshifts how we compose or order the world. In understanding our movements, mobilities, and presences within social, geographical, and historical spaces, how might our improvisation radically shift history? Parousia, according to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer is the state of absolute presence—the timelessness of an experience despite and within its multiple repetitions in art and performance. In suspending time through parousia, how can we decolonize fixed scores and deterministic dramaturgies to improvise and migrate our present to new futures?
MORE ABOUT “BIG IDEAS IN IMPROVISATION”
This year’s “Big Ideas in Art + Culture + Improvisation” lecture continues the annual tradition of the “Big Ideas in Improvisation” series, which is dedicated to showcasing provocative thinkers and creative practitioners in a public forum as they share ideas and insights about the power, expansive force, and urgency of improvisation.
These public lectures, aimed at a general audience, will encourage us to consider how the artistic practices of improvisation developed by creative practitioners can translate into broader spheres of influence and action. Improvisational practices can put pressure on unquestioned assumptions, help us discover new ways of being, and put into action potential solutions to some of our most pressing contemporary global challenges.
The inaugural Big Ideas in Improvisation lecture was a conversation between Vijay Iyer and Fred Moten. You can watch a recording of this lecture in the IICSI Research Library.
