SWEAT Kumasi

SWEAT Kumasi has manifested as an immersive sound installation, a musical composition, a set of dance remixes, and a podcast, which emerged out of a month long residency at perfocraZe International Artist Residency- [pIAR] in Kumasi, Ghana in March 2021. The first performance intervention featured Karyka and was presented as a work in progress at our group show “x7”. SWEAT Kumasi was then shown in small experimental formats at Mad Deep Studios in Berlin, Germany, where visitors were invited to take part in an embodied deep listening format. Three remixes by Ghanaian producers TMSKDJ, Lotus Beatz and Brah Rex were released in July 2022. The original sound piece premiered on Cashmere Radio Berlin and was performed as a duet with Ambra Stucchi in a new performance entitled sweating together which premiered at alpha nova & galerie futura in 2023, with support from Musikfonds.

SWEAT Kumasi features sonic contributions and auditory imprints from laboring bodies at work, as well as recorded conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art. The sonic landscape of this work has been woven exclusively from field recordings gathered in and around Kumasi, ultilizing pIAR as first site of home and expanding outwards to synchronistic encounters, intuitively following the body at work. The conversations are less a sonic research archive than they are a means to speak across intersectionalities by anchoring in common space: as sexualized bodies, as working bodies, as artistic bodies and as performative bodies. These are the sounds of sweaty bodies: labouring, dancing, fucking, sacrificing and surviving.

In focus is the auditory and audibility; which bodies can be heard and which bodies are silenced by the audible? What happens in the dark? What is felt or sensed in the quiet space between bodies, placed within and contexualized by the pounding loudness of our sweaty bodies at work?

Heartfelt gratitude to those who contributed so generously in our encounters, including Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT], Mawuenya Bubu Amudzi, Martin Toloku, Onsoh Edward, Eryka Dellenbach, Zoë Binetti, Hiroko Tsuchimoto, Karyka, Jawo Zaria Graba, Adwoa Kesewaa Gaisie, Isshak Fuseini, Muhammedu Abubakari and many others.