Matana Roberts: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS

Matana Roberts’s immersive video and sound installation addresses the turbulent political events of the past year in the US: the presidential election, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol, and their ineluctable intertwining. Roberts portrays the US states in a large-scale installation of fifty loudspeakers developed specifically for the daadgalerie. The individual speakers and their various “classes of sound” make tangible the country’s complexity, diversity, and division, i.e. the cacophony of the present moment. For her abstract visual collages, Roberts draws from her personal archive of photographs and videos as well as found-footage material of American protest movements such as video clips of demonstrations posted on the internet. Roberts combines these projections with a massive loudspeaker installation, thereby confronting audiences with a deliberately overwhelming situation.

Matana Roberts focuses attention here on the distortions and accelerations that undermine meaning when transferred from physical to digital space as well as the escalating of these mediated realities on various levels when reverberating in physical spaces. Consequences such as loss of control and powerlessness, as well as targeted manipulation and the exercise of power, overlap and reinforce each other. Roberts interweaves into every turn of this vortex the perspective of Black communities in the US regarding ongoing inequality, police violence, and arbitrariness. As in her previous works, she reflects not least on the intergenerational traumas of Black communities and their echoes in the current situation. Despite the rage she unleashes, Matana Roberts ultimately leaves her audiences with a sense of hope and a strong statement for the power of collectivity.

The internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts is perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community, and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. Constellation began documenting the Coin Coin project in 2011 and has released the first four of a projected twelve album-length chapters to date.

Matana Roberts was music & sound fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2019–20. She lives in Berlin.

The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program is funded by the German Foreign Office and the Senate of Berlin.