Biennale College Musica - David Shongo / Estelle Schorpp

Interviews of Silence: Tribune Congo Mapping is a performance in the form of a film-concert that aims to build a platform for advocacy and justice with four million people dead and thousands wounded in the war of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo that broke out in 1998. Despite numerous denunciations, no social nor legal justice have been rendered to the victims of this war in general and to women in particular. In this vacuum of justice and speech, it seemed to me urgent and necessary to set up an alternative court where my music could be here as an interlocutor and a response to this memory of the war. The encounter between my childhood memories of the war and the testimonies of the women victims of this war becomes a space of justice and resilience possible between the women and me.

Through the use of bird recordings archives from the late nineteenth century and beginning of twen- tieth century, A Conversation Between a Partially Educated Parrot and a Machine explores the multiple relationships between birds, humans and sound reproduction technologies. In the late nineteenth century, Eldridge Johnson, head of Victor Records, said about the phonograph that it “sounded much like a partially educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head”. It is my intention to unfold the comparison between an ill-behaved bird and a sound reproduction technology to emphasize on the sonic similarities between technology artefacts and birds’ song and to tell a story where birds, humans and machines make music together.