Mnemosonic Recollection
édhéa - MAPS (Master of Arts in Public Spheres), Sierre
20-23 February 2023

"I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island... Things go on disappearing, one by one.”
Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police

In Yoko Ogawa’s novel, The Memory Police, things whose existence and durability were once taken for granted are made to disappear quite arbitrarily, and not long afterwards, also the memory that they had ever existed. Speculatively projecting ourselves into the dystopia imagined by Ogawa – one that is not so far from certain ecological, political and technological contexts of today’s world - we ask ourselves how we can develop mnemosonic strategies and forms to keep alive not only the knowledge but the sense and feel of what is most precious to us. Perhaps more than images, it is sound that can carry and preserve the affective relation we have to objects, ideas, experiences, species, languages, emotions, forms of life at risk of disappearing. "Mnemosonic Recollection" is an invitation to use radio as a mode of resistance to cancellation, forgetting, oblivion.

EPISODE 01 - Echoelse (Flurina Brügger and Louis Levesque)
If music playing devices crashed tomorrow and all our playlists became obsolete, what song would you remember? Would it be a melody or a lyric, or both?
It has been proven that music can help people with end-stage Alzheimer’s disease, as if it could transcend illness and re-establish a forgotten relation with our recollections. In most cities, bird songs are disappearing under the noise of “progress”, while street whistlers, humming lovers or buzzing melancholics are taking flight too. So, what do we remember now, collectively?
Interested in these questions, we went to listen to vestiges of song memories that inhabit the wanderers of the Swiss town of Sierre.

MNEMOSONIC RECOLLECTION
a workshop led by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
with Shatha Afify, Flurina Brügger, Mohamed Elbakry, Alexander Fritz, Clément Lambelet, Louis Levesque, Jonathan Levy, Nižic Anica Lora, Florian Rubin, Salomé Coste Blochet, Malgorzata Stankiewicz, Hafiza Asmal Valodia
Many thanks to Bertrand Emaresi, Petra Koehle & Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin