Sonic Testimonies: Creating New Imaginaries From the In-between

Chapter in in Many Voices, ed Hannes Schumacher, Freigeist Verlag, Berlin, 2022.

The text engages the viscous volume of sound generated between knuckles and wall grasps me as I grasp it. Both literally and metaphorically we comprehend and apprehend each other in its liquid grasp and understand that the sense we have at this moment is entangled and complex. It is not a sense of but a sense from: from honeyed interactions that make the in-between thinkable as an accessible place.

It deliberates how this is the place we access in Mikhail Karikis’s works. That is a place which is not on a map but in performance and in interactions. It becomes visible through participation: that of all the human and more-than-human protagonists that take part in its production as well as the audience that are involved in its perception. Thus, it is testimony to the invisible in-between that holds the knowledge of encounters and transformations from which we can imagine the world as a performance of relationships and interdependencies rather than as lines and dots, boundaries and structured others.

In this way it suggests that Karikis’s work creates such possible and even impossible worlds for which we lack maps and a lexical understanding, but which generate a different view through which we can transform ourselves: to transform the way we know and think; and to transform how we see the world and each other.