Feasting the volcano and cheers to the abundance of scales

Episōdo 03
Chasing the Scent

A transcontinental tributary convened by Kabelo Malatsie, Michelle Wong, and Lantian Xie, investigates and performs the aporias arising from claims to equality, made with bodies, words, sounds, costumes, instruments, and with shifting forums. This draws from the insights of a minor strand in legal theory that engages with the way people transform courtrooms into forums to speak and make the act of speech itself the site for claims to justice.

Rains fall across the entire surface of a planet continuously for two million years—Carnian Pluvial Episode—pitter patter dispersed across contagious relays. From this, we intimate a scent milieu. Shino Hashimoto plays a motorbike engine spitting exhaust fumes into speech, rescuing appeals from waste, you know, like how radioactivity can also call prayer. Sumayya Vally reminds us of this with a call to ingest architecture. Digestion we think as vast, precarious, planetary infrastructure. The call drops every five minutes when we Skype with Kaushal Sapre and Aasma Tulika. They are plotting wormholes through data streams. On night drives in the desert, Ahmed and Rashid bin Shabib push hands with posterity, speculating elastic invitations to bypass unbuilding. A haunting, and then an appearance; Hala Ali draws a paralegal silhouette of an outfit worn by Muammar Gaddafi. Christian Nyampeta plays a Rodrigue Karemera love song. 

In the graveyard shift Radio tropiezo uses noise, improvisation, spoken word and poetic lectures contemplating the Mexican prison system. Spatially, throats and tongues are acknowledged in Dineo Seshee Bopape’s spontaneously recorded song. A slug leaves a trail on concrete. In songs and shared listening with a stranger, Amiya Nagpal refuses misery, renders life as abundance exceeding biological given. Organs swap bodies, the left and right eye are moved from one body to another. Abhishek Hazra gives voice to the eyes’ last view.

There were many days in Hong Kong when it rained artificially, sometimes washing away voices unheard. Mark Chung replays the erasure of what forms part of an illegal chant, the name of a place, an unpredictable past. On the island of Java some people orient themselves according to where the Fire Mountain is in relation to where they are. Sets built after allegedly important moments of a nation appear on films as fact. Grace Samboh evaluates them as visual sources of truth, and then goes on a scooter ride. Santhosh S jostles time with time with time with time with time with…

YOKOHAMA TRIENNALE 2020

17 June-11 October 2020
https://www.yokohamatriennale.jp/english/2020/