Sound art exhibition series featuring:

Diego Behncke / Farhad Farzali / Ruben Bass / MINQ & Derek MF Di Fabio / Julia Koffler / Soft as Snow / Zach Hart / Makoto Oshiro / True Romantic / Germaine Png 

Location: Zwitschermaschine, Potsdamer Str. 161, 10783 Berlin

In the spirit of posing answers for questions not yet asked, Assemblages showcases time-based works that function on multiple temporal scales. By merging, questioning, and reinventing formats like performances, lectures, workshops, or listening sessions, an indeterminate map takes form, presenting a speculative cartography in expanding directions.

In 1977, Jacques Attali claimed that music announces a society to come, heralding the political, economic, and cultural order of succeeding generations. He seemed to rightfully predict the political economy of different epochs based on the structural relations between music and noise. Through this method, he problematized the industrialization of music as a commodity in the 20th century, in what he called "the stockpiling of time", a circumstance which led -among other things- to a repetitive and incapacitating way of thinking about possible futures outside of the normative modes of production. The conceptualization of time as a commodity gives rise to a generalized disillusion concerning viable alternatives. We seem to find ourselves constantly asking, "What comes next?". Production and its subsequent critique appear to be in a constant panic, trying to look for an exit in the next object of novelty that could break this stagnation of meaning.

The exhibition explores, in contrast, what it means to position ourselves amid precarity and unpredictability. Instead of seeing the world through the binary of progress and decay, is it possible to accept indeterminacy as the condition of our time? Anna Tsing, in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, characterizes assemblages as open-ended gatherings whose emergent effects of encounters make life happen. Compared to the unified beat that progress marches to, assemblages are the unintentional interplay of multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories. By adopting the term polyphonic assemblages, we inquire about communal effects without assuming them and speculate on reframing how we pose the questions that make us think about the future.

More infos at: about.sounds.berlin