Infectious reader #7 : Saout Africa(s) Manifesto

Reading by Anna Raimondo

Saout Radio has been a platform and ongoing archive of sound and radio art and a web-radio dealing primarily with the Maghreb, Africa and the Middle-East, founded in 2012 by artists Younes Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo.

Saout Africa(s) has been the last curatorial project conceived for documenta 14 at Savvy Galery in Berlin in 2017.

Saout Africa(s) plays on one side both with the resonance with the English word “south” and with the literal sense of the Arabic word “saout” meaning "voice" and "sound" but, on the other side, the title also resonates with the plurality of meanings and imaginaries coming from the word “Africa”.

Listeners are invited to experience and explore different “Africa(s)”, from Morocco to South Africa, from Senegal to Ethiopia, passing through possible concepts related to Africa, disseminated and nourished trough diasporas communities in Europe and elsewhere.

Beyond a monolithic construction and over geographic limitations and limits of the word “Africa” itself, Saout Africa(s) proposes for the 21 radiophonic sessions an immersion in a sonic ocean, where to loose the notion of boundary and explore multiple perspectives on what "Africa" could mean and imply.

Reactivating Saout radio archives trough different voices and interventions, producing or diffusing new live performances, giving back a huge panorama of radio and sonic arts of nowadays, Saout Radio wants to activate an international network to generate personal and collective perspectives and interpretations of possible Africa(s).