What Happens When History Is Not Only Remembered, but Sounded?

In his lecture performance, multi-instrumentalist, sound artist and teacher Nii Noi Nortey draws on two ideas: on the one hand, Cheikh Anta Diop's call for recognition of Africa's historical impact and, on the other hand, Fela Kuti's understanding of music as a political consciousness. There is a productive tension between these two positions, as one is looking for continuity with the origins, while the other insists on an awareness that is created in the present. Starting with the “Gate of No Return,” Nortey explores sound as a form of historical memory and the possibility of return.

With the help of adopted, adapted and specially invented instruments as well as with the help of improvisation, breath, feedback and extended techniques, he approaches the stories of expulsion, rupture and survival embedded in objects, bodies and cultural practices. Feedback here is a technique as well as a signal that — changed — returns from the system it has passed through.

The lecture performance presents improvisation as a historical method that not only remembers the past but can also be found in the present. Improvisation refuses to shut down the past; it records what a body does under the weight of its burden and what burden it refuses to bear.

Instead of reconstructing the Middle Passage, Nortey asks what sound can reveal about their continued afterlife and whether listening itself can become a form of return — return not as a restoration of what has been lost, nor as a repetition, but as a relation: as a way of standing in the present in the presence of what remains.