everywhere, nowhere but rooted
This evening is dedicated to the work of three of the latest residents of Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Nee, a radio space for curatorial and artistic practices. Nombuso Mathibela & Naledi Chai, buulbuul and Naomi Hettiarachchige Hubèrt were residents in 2024, where they engaged in a research process that resulted in the production of sonic works that now form part of the radio ́s extensive archive.
The thematic and poetics of the three pieces resound with the research of Voice as Landscape, an editorial line of Perdu focused on the relationship between voice, body and place across time; and in the poetics found across mediums beyond text and language.
Through this collaboration we seek to spatialize the radio artworks, explore the shift in affects that result from presence, both, from the artist but also with an audience. This exercise is not of translation but rather a reorganization of materials, research and formats that experiment with the leakages and recaptures that occur in the movement between artistic forms.
The program will consist of the following works:
Hi! Congo
A sound piece by remote residents Nombuso Mathibela & Naledi Chai, who are based in Johannesburg, South Africa. We’ll listen to a chapter of Hi! Congo, their ongoing radio play centering the Democratic Republic of Congo. It tells stories of the intangible ruins and consequences of colonial extractive economies through theories of home, dislocated diaries and displaced memories. The work references and derives its title from South African musician, guitarist and vocalist Dr. Philip Tabane and his band Malombo.
Interior Motives
Naomi Hettiarachchige Hubèrt delves into the experience of being mentally and emotionally connected to multiple places at once, a conditioning often felt in diasporic realities. Inspired by memories of Naomi’s mother’s long-distance phone calls with family overseas – calls that were less about conversation or translation and more about simply sharing presence – the work explores what it means to be physically in one place while listening to another.
‘nargis-e mastāna’
Birds, flowers, cruising, heartbreaks, flutes, drums, and love gardens with peris; a baq (garden) is an imaginary paradise of longing. Connecting and (re)interpreting traditional and modern imagery, buulbuul explores what shape a modern queer understanding of Central Asian poetry and sound can take. ‘nargis-e mastāna’ is a poem part of their sonic poetry bundle they developed during the residency that will be expanded into a live performance. The title refers to a phrase often used by the Persian poet Hafez and came to mean an intoxicated and infatuated gaze.
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Naomi Hettiarachchige Hubèrt is an artist and graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She’s interested in how to re-enchant, challenge and rewrite hegemonic, western belief systems that infiltrate the everyday and spill into personal and collective consciousness. Her research is often activated through storytelling, which carries voices of human and non-human entities, alternative universes and ways of inter-existing, (auto-)fiction and reappropriated signifiers that manifest into visual, textual and sonic gestures.
Nombuso Mathibela and Naledi Chai are based in Johannesburg, South Africa and worked as a duo for this residency. Nombuso Mathibela is a cultural worker, educator, writer, and vinyl selector working through sound, focusing on anti-colonial liberation histories and cultural ecological behaviours in Africa. She is the founder of Jewel Scents & Song, a Pan-African research space thinking through metal and jewelry production. Mathibela is an associate at Nawi Collective and an archivist at the Centre for the Study of Race, Class and Gender at the University of Johannesburg. Naledi Chai is an interdisciplinary artist working in filmmaking, collage, design, and sculpture. Her work explores object displacement and space, and repurposes discarded materials. Chai is interested in methods, approaches and ideas that centre Sub-Saharan African art practices. She has collaborated with Boiler Room TV, was recently part of Bauhaus. Listening.Workshop at the Goethe-Institut and curated International Drone Day 2024 in Johannesburg.
buulbuul is a collective formed by Haider & Kas, artists from Kazakhstan currently based in The Netherlands. This lyrics & sound collective is based on the poetic and musical concept called ‘gül-u bulbul’, which refers to the flower gardens and nightingales in the love poetry (ghazals) of the Persianate world, such as that of Hafez. Modern-day pop songs in Central Asia, despite using a contemporary Turkic vocabulary and sound, still borrow their musical and lyrical inspirations from those traditions, which began before Russo-Ottoman attempts to erase their Persianate influences. By further fleshing out these concepts in an experimental way, both lyrically and sonically, Haider & Kas also focus on the homoerotic aspect of those ghazals.
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Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee is an Amsterdam-based radio space for curatorial and artistic practices. They host and produce radio shows and podcasts, by and with artists and designers. With a mobile studio, Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee travels to academies, biennials and museums. They also commission sound and performance pieces, related to their ongoing research strands. In 2022 Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee initiated an international artist-in-residence programme.
