Gilles Aubry - Sawt, Bodies, Species: Sonic Pluralism in Morocco

In Sawt, Bodies, Species, Gilles Aubry offers an account on sonic pluralism in Morocco across a wide domain of activities, including archives, music, art, healing, and ecology. "Sawt," in Arabic, literally means sound and voice. Sound in Morocco thus intimately relates to the body; it never quite corresponds with its modern Western counterpart as a phenomenon separable from the other senses. Sonic pluralism recapitulates Aubry's attempts to think sound and aurality together with modernity and (de-)coloniality. The transformative power of sonic pluralism is expressed in people's acts of listening and sounding, aimed at questioning and shifting social conventions. On the level of ecology, sonic pluralism reveals extra-human agencies that mediate between people and their environment. Drawing on critical Sound Studies, ethnographic research, and artistic practice, Aubry's dense descriptions are complemented by audiovisual essays created in collaboration with musicians, artists, and scientists.

Biography

Gilles Aubry is a Swiss artist, musician and researcher. His installations, films and performances have been presented at numerous international art and music venues, museums and festivals over the last twenty years. He sstudied Sound Art at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) and received a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bern. His research links sound, technology, and the environment to issues of power and colonialism in different regional contexts. He teaches Sound Studies at the University of the Arts (UDK) and at the HKMW in Berlin.

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