a listening bar

We share the album together in silence.

The session begins on time.

Arriving a bit late? No worries, just come in quietly to preserve the listening atmosphere. We can’t wait to see you!

Please note: we do not take reservations.

In the rainy season, when rice sprouts still find their way to flooded rice fields, a sonic experiment collapses voices and sounds from now and then. Tales from Malafo are also tales of humanity; they recount dreams, desires, longings, and hopes; they are about people who fight together to heal the wounds circumstances have opened up. Inherited wounds for which one must still take responsibility, in search of a balance where love thrives in the community and land. The vocal testimonies of matriarchs, the songs and tales of children and their children, adult and elderly men, the speech of rivers and boulders, the stories told by birds and the wind. Living and non-living, material and immaterial beings are summoned to bend time in the sonoteca – ringing land, seeding sounds, sonoteca – a space recently built with the Malafo community as part of the Mediateca Onshore to store sounds that have passed through and are still to come. MATRIARCHS OF MALAFO is a sound installation dealing with synesthesia to send messages about the reconstruction of entanglements.

Meters and meters of film sound, radio chatter about stars, movies, and film shoots, a passion for Schlager from German films, outtakes and unused footage, and fragmented interviews with famous and lesser known names of film history: This is what we hear on the hundreds of tapes recorded and collected by Hanswolfgang Bergs now stored at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Bergs understood the sound film not only as a visual but primarily as an acoustic medium. From 1946 to 1969, he produced countless radio programs for German public broadcaster Südwestfunk about films and filmmakers, making radio a now nearly forgotten site of popular film culture in West Germany. To do so, Bergs and his colleagues traveled with tape recorders to festivals, premieres, and film sets. The focus of Bergs’ work gradually became a collection of re-recorded film soundtracks, which he systematically organized into a film sound archive. The question today is: What can we do with this archive?

Archival Assembly #3: The Politics of Listening to the Moving Image

The third edition of the biennial festival turns its focus to the importance of sound and language within the archival practices of international film history, organized by Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst. The festival venues this year are silent green, Kino Arsenal, SINEMA TRANSTOPIA and migas where a sonic daytime program is presented every day between 12:00 and 18:00. Come any time to enter the two-hour loops.