In ‘Afro-Sonic Mapping’, artist and musician Satch Hoyt takes early music recordings from Angola and the Congo documented by European anthropologists between 1890 and 1907 as the starting point to investigate what Hoyt dubbs ’the migration of the afro-sonic signifier’. Expressed through paintings, interviews, concerts and sound-performances, he develops acoustic mappings of history – testimonies of enslavement and expulsion, but also of resistance, empowerment and liberation. Hoyt understands these sounds as a living archive that enables the possibility of ’sonic restitution’ in a postcolonial world.
In this dialogue, Hoyt and curator Paul Goodwin discuss the migration of sounds between Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia mapping how these sound are inscribed in contemporary rhythms across the Atlantic and beyond.
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