« ABA's Air SALON » air salon: Soft notes: Voice messages for the collective ear

You are listening to a multilogue of recorded messages, a conversation that is many-to-many, yet one-way. By artificially (re)constructing a conversation that never really took place, this edition of ABA’s Air Salon is referring to a contemporary phenomenon you might recognize: sending voice messages back and forth instead of having a conversation – sometimes long monologues that don’t expect an answer, sometimes exchanging multiple 3 second snippets instead of just giving the other a call. As a contemporary form, the voice message and its ever-growing popularity might hold some relevance for collective practices and how they often (dis)function: a lot of sending and receiving, conflating multiple channels, to eventually (and hopefully) end up having a conversation that matters, but never speaking with one voice.

"soft power" is a collectively run non-profit art association and venue for artistic projects that combines curatorial, artistic, sociological and design approaches in an ongoing engagement with the structural realities and political conditions of (collective) practices. In our voice messages, we are asking questions about collective work, its ups and downs, its potential for dividing efforts and multiplying outcomes (sometimes the other way around), and the alternatives it may pose to the way that art is produced and consumed. We sent our questions to other Berlin-based collectives or collectively organised projects, and received some voice messages in return – joining us with their Voice messages for the collective ear are:

Alicia Reuter, co-founder and co-director of the Berlin Art Prize

Anissa Carrington, co-founder and member of the DJ network SLIC Unit

Viviane Tabach & Theseas Efstathopoulos, two sobat-sobat (documenta fifteen’s group of art mediators) and editors of the publication Ever Been Friendzoned by an Institution?.

Tra My Nguyen, co-founder and member of the design collective Studio ABO

ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations across the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and archiving of these forms of ephemeral knowledge production.