Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler MAD VIBRATIONS: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators

With an opening and ending meditation,
conceived by Negarra A. Kudumu

And the hums, voices, noises and mad vibrations of:
Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelations of Rastafari, Bill Howell, Calypso Rose, Toni Morrison, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Malcolm X, Phil Cohran & The Artistic Heritage Ensemble, Kojey Radical, Lotic, Essex Hemphill, Phil Cohran & Legacy, and Kelsey Lu.

Mad Vibrations: A Humming Ritual for Untrustworthy Narrators side-steps the cruelty of colonial modernity, and focuses on the radical, renegade voices of decolonial struggles who demand different realities for themselves through various forms of self-care and exchanges via diasporic and pan-african networks, connections, echoes and re-sonances.

These decolonial vibrations and voices found their waves and ways while experiencing prohibition and criminalization. By using improvised or coded language, dance, music or non-verbal communication, which was often read as inaudible, made from scratch, unreliable, inconsistent, mad and incomprehensible forms of exchanges between enslaved and colonial subjects people managed to move below the radar of the systems of slavery and colonialism.

„Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad… in order to not loose your mind. These strategies of survival made the truly modern person. They’re a response to predatory western phenomena.” (Toni Morrison)

Sounds and vibrations, vibrating as well as listening, within and beyond the scope of what can be heard, carefully and deciphered or lost within the quiet, the unruly and improvised forms of resonances will guide us through a patchwork of sonic, decolonial counter realities and their poetics and politics.

Mad Vibrations is an invitation to breathe, dance, feel, sit, embody, mourn, moan, laugh, vibrate, improvise, shout and be quiet(ly) together.

This recorded version of Mad Vibrations was initially convened in the context of School Without Center/District Berlin in October 2018.