Nour Sokhon and Jilliene Sellner spent much of the last eighteen months developing Expanded Turn, a soundwalk, sound installation and video, a commissioned collection of works for Neue Kunstraum Düsseldorf (NKR). We had invited contributions from the public in Hastings (UK)and Düsseldorf responding to a set of questions that explore the senses during the pandemic. We are very grateful to those who sent us their words, photos and videos. Making all of the work was fascinating and is the beginning of a larger, ongoing archive. Click here for details of the installation and talk.
We had the exciting opportunity to develop an audio/video piece called Blue Spaces, a response to the current climate crisis, for LAAF 2021. Heya also did a talk about our creative processes and working together apart. Click here to watch Blue Spaces.
This year Heya participated in WLD – we spent a simultaneous one hour recording and writing/drawing responses to our sound environment, considering how privilege might be embedded in field recording and listening practices. The results are available here. Yara Mekawei broadcasted an edited version of the day’s recording on Radio Submarine and we are currently producing an episode for Framework Radio based on our recordings and reflections of the day.
This year Heya made a short dispatch that melded sounds during lockdown or unlockdown from Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo and Hastings to create this (we think) rather moving and beautiful soundscape.
A huge thank you to Fulya Uçanok, Dilara Turan and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu for organising this really stimulating panel session.
Collaboration Through the Lens of Three Perspectives in Musicking Practices
Fulya Uçanok Istanbul Bilgi University
Dilara Turan Istanbul Bilgi University
Heya Sound Collective:
Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu Istanbul Technical University MIAM
Nour Sokhon Artist, Sound designer & Filmmaker
Yara Mekawei Electronic music composer & Sound artist
Jilliene Sellner Goldsmiths
This panel brings together main issues of collaborative approaches to music making and research discussed through perspectives of new musicology and artistic research. The panel combines three case studies that follow strands of feminist criticism, relationality, co-authorship, new materialist and posthumanism thinking, entangled within assemblages of network practices and scene studies. By doing so, it offers perspectives of looking into how and why collaborative approach matters in our music making and knowledge production today. Critiquing some of the conventional approaches rooted in Eurogenetic Art Music tradition, the panel focuses on issues of authority of singular ‘genius’ musician, musicking based on primacy of notation and the idea of “the music itself”(1) , and the neglect of cultural contexts and social engagement. Following the practices of collaboration and co-creation, the aim is to open up a window into new ways of musicking that might potentially enable inclusion, multivalence, and ecological validity.
Within the panel, these issues would be explored through the lenses of three very specific viewpoints. Turan’s fieldwork on the new music scene in Turkey explores the ways collaborative thinking changes the processes of knowledge production on issues such as the conceptualization of musical categories, and formation of musical discourses and histories. Her study differs from the other two papers in that the collaborations occur between the researcher and the scene members, as well as among all participants of her study via collaborative writing strategies. Uçanok proposes a relational model for electroacoustic composition practice. In the practice model, relationality focuses on practices of cultivating response-ability of the composer with humans and more-than-human agents, within an entangled sympoietic musical space. Here, response-ability is built on aural and embodied practices that are usually overlooked in the bulk of today’s electroacoustic discourses. By privileging such a position, this practice revolves around resonances and potentialities of acts of listening-with-in entangled relations. This study differs from the other two practices that will be presented in the panel mainly by means of collaborating with more-than-human agents and offering a form of collaboration that is situated in the composition practice. Heya’s research project discusses co-creation as active listening, ‘playing’ and composing through ‘the network’. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the shared limitations and opportunities of live telematic collaborative performance across geographies. Differently from the other two studies presented in the panel, Heya’s approach is based on real-time improvisation within network systems where agents do not share a common physical space.
This panel aims to raise questions that are important in musicking practices which may or not have answers. Starting by asking the reasons that direct each research towards a collaborative approach, we aim to explore our common curiosity, heightened sensitivity in the other, and a desire to co-create with others to produce spaces of multivalence. Main discussion will revolve around the importance of the act of listening, in an extended sense that includes both aural and embodied performativities. In doing so, the discussion will touch upon each of the researchers’ reflections on what collaborative practices do to the self, to the practices, and the outcomes.
(1) “The music itself” is a term borrowed from Suzanne G. Cusick used to explain the conceptualization of music as an autonomous entity, referencing only to itself, without considering people, biographies, cultural context and environments.
Heya: Feminist networked co-creation between Europe and the Middle East
Heya Sound Collective
This paper discusses co-creation as active listening, ‘playing’ and composing through ‘the network’. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the shared limitations and opportunities of live telematic collaborative performance across geographies. Heya [heeya] (‘she’ in Arabic and also a friendly greeting in English) is a research project and experimental musiking collective facilitated by PhD researcher sound artist and composer Jilliene Sellner at Goldsmiths University, London. The project aims to bridge women in the collective who make sound and experimental music in the UK, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey with each other and a global audience. The co-creation consists of live networked performances between Nour Sokhon (LE), Jilliene Sellner (CA/UK), Yara Mekawei (EG) and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (TR). Mixing and reacting to each other’s field recordings and sonic experiments, collaboration becomes a horizontal and egalitarian method of decolonizing musicological research, circumventing top down, traditional methods and conclusions.
Also presented for this seminar:
Curb your musicology via collaborative approach: Tracing yeni müzik(2)
Dilara Turan
Towards a Response-able Electroacoustic Composition Practice in Search of Sympoietic Multivalence
On 31 Oct 2020, Heya performed a live networked jam between Egypt, Turkey, UK and Brasil for Sonic Electronics for Iklectik London curated by Laura Netz. Full event is here (Heya is from 2:10).
Nour Sokhon and Jilliene Sellner, members of Heya, are selected for a commission from NKR.
NKR Call # 2
Presentation of all submissions
NKR Call # 2
The NKR published an open call in spring 2020. 146 videos with various concepts and exhibition ideas from international artists have been received. The NKR would like to thank all of the artists for participating in the NKR Call # 2.
The jury chose the “Expanded Turn” project by Nour Sokhon and Jilliene Sellner:
because we are showing a position that is still unknown in Düsseldorf and NRW and that is embedded in the discursive, global art context. The jury is looking forward to seeing how the project develops based on the submitted proposal. “
(Statement by the jury – Alisa Berger, Lena Ditte Nissen, Moritz Ellerich, Detlef Klepsch, Matthias Neuenhofer, Anne Schülke – July 18, 2020)
The “Expanded Turn” project will take place from September 9, 2021 to October 10, 2021 at the NKR. NKR Call # 3 is expected to be released in spring 2021. Interested parties can subscribe to the newsletter and will be informed of the publication.
The NKR Call project is funded by the Art and Culture Foundation of the Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf.
Idea and organization: Detlef Klepsch & Anne Schülke
On 15 July after a brilliant discussion panel in the afternoon on accessibility, Heya artists performed Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu’s score ‘Fragments’ for the opening concert. Amazing program. This time we used Zoom and various configurations for routing our DAWs – a lot of noise last minute…more tech to sort through! We love the preparation though.
Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu and Jilliene Sellner in conversation with Teatro Bairro Alto’s music curator Diana Combo about the Heya project and perspectives of artists working outside of ‘Western’ infrastructures where freedom of movement and speech has not been a given and compare and contrast to the lockdown experience globally.
For the symposium the discussion with Jilliene Sellner, Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu and Diana Combo (TBA) will focus on the perspectives of artists working outside of ‘Western’ infrastructures where freedom of movement and speech has not been a given and compare and contrast to the lockdown experience globally.
Heya هي 