Notes from Below.

About

With ABADIR, Gilles Aubry, Keli Safia Maksud, Lila Tirando a Violeta, Sara Ouhaddou and Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Notes from Below is a three-pronged project that brings together the works of artists and musicians whose research, poetics, and discursive practices are attuned to sounding out and listening in. The exhibition – under the same title – features the work of Gilles Aubry, Keli Safia Maksud, Sara Ouhaddou and Simnikiwe Buhlungu, which can be thought of as creative notes that search beyond the surface – of inscription (cultural, sociological and technological) to creatively interrogate, recover and imagine traditions, practices and knowledge. The artworks here are thought of as notes, whose arrangements create a composition of ideas and perspectives within the exhibition space.

Lila Tirando a Violeta's live set and Abadir's DJ set further extend this principle through their musical performances. They merge different rhythmic styles from globally connected subcultures, creating speculative soundscapes that traverse sound art and pop music. They blend percussion, and layered effects with geophysical, and biological sounds, defying categorisation to offer a critical and forward-looking mix. These performances will be preceded by an artist talk by Lila Tirando a Violeta, and the book launch of Aubry’s recently published work, which offers an account of sound and aurality in Morocco.

Notes from Below: The Exhibition

The exhibition tenders an approach to notes (accounts, notation, inscriptions, reminders) as creative impressions that are in process of becoming, that are being read. Notes also refers to (graphic) scores, musical notations and instruction as creative forms that propel knowledge and action into the future. These notes are coupled with an understanding of the below as that which is beneath – the quiet, inaudible yet present.

Each of the artists are guided by processes of translation, encoding, and transcription that demonstrate how inherited forms and traditions inform lineages, yet are unstable and open to change and adaptation. Their works demonstrate a myriad of approaches to how history, memory and knowledge can be cast across generations and geographies. From ancestral methods of care and manufacture, language as a mutable form, gestural communication of bees, to graphic notations and scores for the casting and transfer of practices, Notes from Below asks for us to look and listen closer to the cultural and epistemic transfers that occur on micro and macro levels, in personal and communal spaces.

Working with carbon paper and embroidery, Keli Safia Maksud draws upon musical notation as a language to think through the traces and audible legacies of history and identity, particularly in relation to African independence. In Topographies of Sound, Maksud uses embroidery as a drawing tool to navigate the audible traces of (African) postcolonial histories. Here she works with carbon paper as a material surface to stitch through musical notations. Topographies of Sound is a continuation of a broader body of work where the artist researched African independence through national anthems. Listening back to these histories, Maksud considers the failures and collapse of post-colonial hopes that prevailed during the early 1960s on the continent. She explores ideas of mimicry, transference and inheritance through the use of carbon paper, for transfer, copying and replication. Her embroidered musical notation into the carbon paper produces (from the back) abstract, rhizomatic lines that break away from the regulated grid of the musical staff that the artist imprints into the paper. Her interest lies in how abstraction can suggest disembodiment, noise and spatial dynamics that exceed comprehension and legibility.

Questions of history, craft and language are explored by Sara Ouhaddou in the screenprint Sans Titre. In this print, Ouhaddou presents a lexicon of forms by drawing upon ceramic objects that she encountered and researched. She turns to the history of ceramic trade in the Mediterranean by focusing on North Africa’s relationship with Europe to complicate and complexify the historical relationship between the Arab-Andalusian world and Marseille during the Middle Ages – a time when ceramics from North Africa was one of the most sought after during the 12 and 13th century in Marseille. The artist delves into the archaeological history of ceramics to raise questions around the hybridisation of knowledge and its forms, including the institutions that preserve it and display it. Ouhaddou’s work looks to new ways of understanding the history of the Mediterranean, giving precedence to other narratives, stories and truths. In so doing, she resists Eurocentric understandings of history, mastery and craft.

Gilles Aubry presents a selection from an on-going body of collaborative research on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. Aubry digs into the significance of seaweed in the region as a resource for industries to harvest, and a material around which social and cultural life revolves for local communities in Sidi Bouzid. Together with a number of interlocutors, Aubry collectively attempts to “listen” to seaweed and pollution on the Atlantic coast.
The film Atlantic Ragagar is poetically attuned to coastal ecology in the Safi area, and the consequences of industrial pollution for the environment and the health of the population.
The film incorporates vocal interventions (Imane Zoubai) and data sets on water pollution (Younes Boundir). Red seaweed is an integral resource for the production of agar, a product that sustains the communities that produce it. In The Binding Effect, we enter into a conversation with a group of local women who collect seaweed for a living, as they talk about labour, marine life and pollution. In a cooking workshop we see how they use agar for baking jelly sweets. Here we glimpse into the importance of seaweed to their everyday lives and how the industrialised harvesting has affected their conditions of working. Accompanying these films is Quantized Sea, an installation comprising elements of agar, copper and textiles that can be thought of as material notes of research. Quantized Sea depicts a marine environment whose ‘nature’ is made of pollution particles and algorithms.

Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s on-going body of work and research on honey bees began with her encounter of The People’s Workbook (1981), a 560-page guide book aimed to provide Black South Africans with ‘practical’ methods to make the most of the few resources they had during Apartheid. The majority of the book focuses on agriculture, water, community work, and outlining methods of self-sustainability, from building your own irrigation systems and water wells, to making your own compost, making woodblock art prints and and how to start beekeeping. The section on beekeeping initiated the artist’s investigation into the forms, methodologies, histories and processes of beekeeping in South Africa and elsewhere, which are presented here are a series of creative notes: as process instant photographs, a sound work and ceramic bee skeps which exist here as prototypes.

In July 2021, Buhlungu recorded the sound of Western honey bees (apis mellifera) in flight while in Amsterdam. With an interest in the well-documented ‘waggle dance’ that honey bees routinely ‘perform’, she transcribed the recordings with the use of a theremin, which she further translated into MIDI messages, and into flight (tswee). dance (tswee). The direction of the sun and the earth’s gravitational pull allows honey bees to accurately communicate – or rather share – knowledges through what has been documented as ‘dancing’. For the artist, the waggle dance reverberates as a soundtrack, a choreography, a signal, an invitation, a job, a play(ing); the beehive as the “cluuuurb”. Buhlungu navigates the intricacies of bees to think of how bodies, knowledge and instinctual histories are carried, transmitted and translated.