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.

MNEMOSONIC RECOLLECTION 4: 46°17′18″ N 7°31′15″ E (Hafiza Asmal Valodia, Salomé Coste Blochet, Alexander Fritz)

Disappearance of Disappearance.

Disappearance of this appearance
That things do disappear.
Disappearance a limit of understanding transformation.
Possessed by preservation
To observe transformation
Transforming time itself.
Becoming disappearance.

Cataloguing and categorising
With ridiculous perseverance to maintain
A meaning for disappearance.
Left in an archive
As it accumulates to create
A reappearance of things in disappearance.

Rights of access to new ears
To reappear
In an attention sphere
To remember all the things that disappear.

Stay clear of a fear to
Understand Transformation.
Deleted when repeated.
Where do things go when they disappear?


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