Artist Talk: "Social Dissonance" w/ Mattin (Billy Bao)

Moderation: Sophie Emilie Beha

IN BETWEEN SPACES is a series of events and platform for music, sounds and sound art from Africa, the Arab world and Europe, their social contexts, transcultural issues and artistic collaborations.

"Social dissonance" and individual and social alienation are a basic condition of living together in today's capitalism. In his lecture on core theses of his book of the same name, artist and musician Mattin reveals the thinking behind his score "Social Dissonance." Designed for documenta 14 (2017), the audience and its interaction becomes the actual instrument here. Published in March 2022, the book is a practical manual and theoretical treatise that explores the emancipatory potential of noise, dissonance, and alienation on an artistic and social level.

" We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural, individuated subjects is determined behind our backs - historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by impersonal mechanisms, as scientific and philosophical analyses show. In today's capitalism, where the gap between self-image and reality is becoming an ever greater source of social and psychological distress, these theoretical insights are potentially explosive. Mattin, an artist and performer, shifts his explorations from the sonic to the social, amplifying alienation and playing with psychic noise to finally light the fuse." (blurb "Social Dissonance").
Sophie Emilie Beha - NICA artist since 2022 and the first curator in the Künstler:innen funding program - leads through the conversation.

On November 8, Mattin plays with his band project Billy Bao at In Between Spaces in the Stadtgarten.
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