Radio workshop for Southern Clairaudience some sound documents for a future act

Radio workshop for Southern Clairaudience some sound documents for a future act
Hong-Kai Wang

Southern Clairaudience is a three-day radio workshop. It calls for participants to engage in a series of conversations, singing, sounding and beyond into what constitutes “clairaudience” through working with a 1925 agrarian protest song named The Sugarcane Song with the aim of presenting a cooperative outcome at Food Cuture Days on November 17 in Vevey.

The Sugarcane Song is ascribed to helping mobilize what is arguably the first anti-colonial, class-conscious agrarian uprising in recorded Taiwanese history: the Erlin Sugarcane Workers Revolt. Written by the Sugarcane Workers Union under Japan’s colonial rule in 1925, it had since receded into oblivion until 2001, when a group of enthused Erlin locals rediscovered the song as a corollary to unearthing evidence of the Revolt itself. Southern Clairaudience some sound documents for a future act proposes an incongruous reading of the excavated song. It sets out to reimagine the long-lost melody with a group of sugarcane planters near the township of Erlin as its geopolitical point of departure, then seeks collaborators and audiences across (il)legible borders to respond by concocting various performative situations. These convocations put forward the question: is it possible to create a variety of second chance(s) for hearing a network of missing affiliations and histories via song and radio making?

*Biography of Hong-Kai Wang

Born in Huwei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Taipei.

The process of Wang’s research-based practice is informed by the unceasing tension between languages, ideologies, identities and knowledge regimes. It is situated at the intersection of aesthetic, discursive and knowledge production, often concerned with politics of missing knowledges resulted by encounters between histories, lived experience and power. Through experimenting with modes of listening, organizing pedagogy as temporary gatherings, mobilizing collaborative sociality as performance, and encouraging alterior bodily interpretations, Wang’s practice often seeks to forge unlikely affiliation and time-space of the transformative beyond received chronologies and geographies. Her works span performance, installation, workshop, publication, sound work, conversation, etc.

Wang has presented her practice internationally at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Warsaw, 2018), Sculpture Center (New York, 2018), Documenta 14 (radio, 2017), Taipei Biennial (Taipei, 2016), Parasophia Kyoto International Festival Contemporary Culture (Kyoto, 2015), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Sydney, 2014), Kunsthall Trondheim (Trondheim, Norway, 2013), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2013) among others.

Wang is currently part of the MFA Music/Sound faculty of Bard College (Annandale-On-Hudson, USA)