What Happens When History Is Not Only Remembered, but Sounded?

Nii Noi Nortey

Nii Noi Nortey. Foto: Ato Annan – Person mit gestreiftem Hut und blauem Gewand, lächelnd vor kunstvoll bemalter Wand und Skulpturen.

In this lecture performance, multi-instrumentalist, sound sculptor, and educator Nii Noi Nortey draws on Cheikh Anta Diop’s call for African historical agency and Fela Kuti’s understanding of music as political consciousness. The two positions sit in productive tension, one seeking continuity with origins, the other insisting on consciousness as something that is produced in the present. Beginning at the ‘Door of No Return’, Nortey explores sound as a form of historical memory and the possibility of return. 

Through inherited, adapted, and invented instruments, improvisation, breath, feedback, and extended techniques, he approaches the histories of displacement, rupture, and survival embedded in objects, bodies, and cultural practices. Feedback here is both a technique and a signal that returns, altered, from the system it passed through. 

The lecture performance proposes improvisation as a historiographic method through which the past is not simply remembered, but encountered in the present. Improvisation refuses to let the past settle; it records what a body does under the pressure of what it carries, and what it declines to carry.

Rather than reconstructing the Middle Passage, Nortey asks what sound can reveal about its continuing afterlives, and whether listening itself can become a form of return—not return as recovery of what was lost, nor as repetition, but as relation: a way of standing in the present in the presence of what remains.

Part of the Programme: "A Philosophical Gathering"

Followed by a concert by The Berlin Afrobeat Company and Santrofi

Safi Faye Hall

A Felasophical Gathering | HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Next date:

• Date Thursday, 15/October/2026 18:00
• Venue Haus der Kulturen der Welt
• Address John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin-Tiergarten