Songs have always been spaces in which our histories have been kept and disseminated. It is in songs that we find our philosophies, histories of struggles and resistances, proposals of our relations to the world and the poetics of our being in relation to all other beings – rivers, forests, mountains, animals etc. – that have been blessed to share space in this pluriverse of ours. What is for certain is that most conventional historiographies can neither contain nor bear our burdens nor our joys. Thus this effort to chart a sonohisteriography. It is said that the eye, thus vision, is the window to the soul. If that is so, then the ear, thus listening, must be the door or even the gateway to the soul. If we accept that the listening organ is the body, the body as ear, then that gateway becomes even wider.

Imagine a panel with… better still imagine a band in three acts with South African artist and activist Letta Mbulu, Congolese artist and activist Franklin Boukaka and Australian artists and activists No Fixed Address. In this conversation in three acts, we will listen to stories of resistances and resiliences, of (re-)generation and rejuvenation in moments of dire straits, stories of love and the impossibilities to destroy our joy, and essentially the power of the sonic language, the body language and the verbal language. As Matthew Shenoda points out in his poem Language: “We understand that nothing happens without a declaration / even independence / So we declare this place our home / and push forward with those who push / & move past the ones whose feet can catch no rhythm / whose lives remain cemented in a history / unchanged plagued by the parliament of greed…” We will explore the medium of song as that space of declaration and as declaration itself.