Paulina Seyfried and Paloma Nana, Temporary Gallery, March 2023

This event aspires to open a space for questions around the family that is primarily nourished sensually, emotionally, artistically, and sonically. In the framework of the exhibition “Unruly Kinships”, this workshop series aims to step away from a purely academic reading and explores the discourse mainly through the sonic and the sensual.

How are questions around family politics and kinship, forms of social and communication sonified, idealised and/or problematised in both popular and subculture? How pervasive is such a (sonic) discourse? What stylistic devices and symbolisms are invoked? How are these historically/culturally rooted and to what extent can popular culture exceed the academic text? We will, amongst others, look into notions of (Afro-diasporic) sisterhood and shared ancestrality in a postcolonial age as we also address the (neoliberal) iconization of the family in contemporary pop culture. Moreover, a central premise will be the question as to what Mykki Blanco in „Family Ties“ extent, in particular, the visual depiction of Black parenthood can be viewed as a decolonising practice that operates against a policy that relegates Black subjects to the matrix of the dysfunctional, prone to crises. This workshop series is a cohesive event. The individual sessions are interrelated content-wise, so it would be nice if you tried to attend all four sessions.

We debuted the listening sessions on 9th March. The first session was well attended with 10 participants in total. It became clear that some of them wouldn’t be able to participate in the entire series, thus, we experienced quite a decrease in the number of participants for the second session. This decrease might have multiple causes:

– the participants’ expectations with regard to the content of the event were not met

– due to late working hours, the clock time of the event could have been unfavorable to some of the participants (two participants even traveled from Düsseldorf to Cologne to attend the first session)

– Temporary Gallery has noticed a general decrease of participants in events since the Covid-19 pandemic

– the fact that the event was announced as a coherent series could have discouraged people from coming

We now decided to announce and treat each listening session as an independent event, so that more people feel encouraged to join us without needing to register for each session. Also we shortened the announcement text for each session, so that it is less intimidating to read. We wanted to keep the upcoming session on 13th April as open as possible contentwise, even though we are aware that this particular series still addresses a predominantly academic audience.