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 3: A STRANGE NAP (by Jonathan Levy-Forcada)
Under the metal tree, in the park, I came upon Dystopia and Utopia. It was a strange nap.
Using field-recordings gathered in Sierre and Geneva, this sound piece was created around the feelings of estrangement and anxiety. Using AI as a tool to inject randomness into the process, the text was built as a cut-up of words from Thomas More’s Utopia and Donna Haraway’s Chtulucene. Fragments of these texts were then put into an AI engine to create sentences consisting of only verbs and adjectives. These sentences, or verbal poetry, were then given to a AI voice-generator to create the chorus of this eerie, multi-layered soundscape.

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-Forcada, Nižic Anica Lora, Florian Rubin, Salomé Coste Blochet, Malgorzata Stankiewicz, Hafiza Asmal Valodia

Many thanks to Bertrand Emaresi, Petra Koehle & Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin