The Concretely WE: Voices From Within the Camp

Mohamed-Ali Ltaief has critically engaged with the sound archives of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, part of the Ethnological Museum in the German capital. In his research, he uncovered the story of Sadok Ben Rachid, a Tunisian poet, singer, and prisoner in the First World War. In his performance, Ltaief loosely interweaves fact and fiction.   

Between 1915 and 1918, the German government made sound recordings in Wünsdorf, a prison camp near Berlin where, along with others, Sadok Ben Rachid was held. In the context of the First World War and European colonialism, sounds, tones, and (traditional) music were, for the first time, labelled as ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ under an ‘ethno-musical’ label. Ltaief unites the archive and Ben Rachid’s poetry, but also Frantz Fanon’s play Parallel Hands (1949) into one performance.  

Ltaief wants to create a counter-narrative to resist the colonial classification in the archive. Sadok Ben Rachid is a good guideline. His sonic refusal/poetry is literally and figuratively an opposing voice. The performance starts from his original sound recordings and merges them with sounds from German ethnomusicologists. In this way they reveal the attitude of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv towards these pages in history: as a deafening silence.  

• Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is an artist and writer, born in Tunisia and based in Berlin. His work explores notions of temporality, sense of space, and geo-philosophy, and is especially interested in the unestablished history of art, lost or abandoned by the singular, ‘universal’ history of modernity. His projects include Ghost of Meaning (2019), The Path of the Sun or the Bare Life (2021) and The Strangeness of the Stranger (2021).

• Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician currently based in New York. His music contrasts the realities of our world with what lies beyond, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. His latest releases include Ballad Air & Fire, Shafts of Sunlight, and The Open Boat (an album trilogy). In 2021, Fofana was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists and was nominated for the National Gallery Prize in Germany. Fofana presents a monthly radio show on NTS Radio, a London-based online radio station.  

• Tarxun (Farshad Xadjehnassiri) is an Iranian sound artist and urban researcher based in Berlin. They studied architecture, and earned a BA at Azad University of Tehran and an MA in Sound Studies at Berlin University of the Arts. Tarxun actively questions the blurred boundaries of crafts in a performative way. Tarxun has had installations at TADAEX (Tehran 2016), GAPS curatorial (London 2017, Tehran&Turin 2019), and Virtual AMOUR (Berlin Art Week 2019), as well as solo works and performances with Pitheorem, Nina Guo, and Fausto Mujica, among others, at Raqs (Amsterdam 2022) and the Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival (Berlin 2023).