Doc’s Kingdom will be back in Odemira from 19 to 23 November 2024, with a programme of screenings, debates, installations, sound performances and collective meals.
Under the title “Ways of Listening”, this year’s programme, curated by Stoffel Debuysere, aims to counter the traditional focus on visuality by developing critical perspectives on documentary from the point of view of sound. In order to imagine and discuss the political and ethical possibilities and implications of the sonic, Doc’s Kingdom will be deployed as a space for collective study that insists on more than meets the eye; a space for viewing and re-viewing cinema in the key of listening.
>> More information through this link.
Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker working across sound, moving image, sculpture, installation and performance, whose work is generated from a deep engagement with sonority, acoustics, access, and complex embodiment. Informed by her experiences of being d/Deaf/hard of hearing and collaborations with others on the d/Deaf spectrum – including composers, athletes, musicians, and actors – Alison builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. Her latest, multi-awarded film The Tuba Thieves (2023), uses real-life tuba thefts in Los Angeles as a springboard to critically explore how the history of sound segregations is deeply embedded into urban spaces through the design and mediation of sound, how sound travels through these substrates and who is allowed or obligated to hear it. She is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Ernst Karel works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and postproduction sound for nonfiction film and video, with an emphasis on observational cinema. He has worked alongside Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and has collaborated with artists and filmmakers such as Anocha Suwichakornpong, J.P. Sniadecki, Luke Fowler, Ben Rivers, and Helen Mirra. As an improviser he has played and recorded with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tim Daisy, Liz Payne and Aram Shelton among others, and with Kyle Bruckmann he forms the group EKG. Lately he works around the practice of actuality/location recording (or ‘fields [plural] recording’) and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival location recordings. He has taught audio recording and composition through the Sensory Ethnography Lab, the Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn, and the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. He is currently an affiliate of the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts at the University of Southern California.
Matilde Meireles is a sound artist and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her work has a multi-sensorial, durational and multi-perspective critical approach to site, where Matilde investigates the potential of listening across spectrums and scales as ways to attune to various ecosystems and articulate plural experiences of the world. Some examples include the inner architectures of reeds and complex water ecologies, resonances in everyday objects, local neighbourhoods and the architecture of radio signals. Her upcoming new album on the Crónica label, entitled Loop. And Again. (2024), delves into the dynamics of magnetic fields, intricate wiring arrangements, and their interconnectedness with the shifts in the surrounding landscape. Her work is also presented regularly in the form of performances, installations, community-based projects and publications. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, Queen’s University Belfast.
Susana de Sousa Dias is a filmmaker and artist from Portugal. Her films and installations explore the dialectics of history and memory, questioning established regimes of visibility with a focus on the archive. Using still photographs and archival imagery, her first works (2000-2017) deal with the memory of the dictatorship in Portugal. Through testimonies from political prisoners, and resulting from extensive research in the national archives, her work played an important role in the public denunciation of the violent repression and torture used by the regime. More recently, she directed Fordlandia Malaise, in 2019, and co-directed Viagem ao Sol, with Ansgar Schaefer, in 2021. She often collaborates with her brother António de Sousa Dias, composer and artist, in the creation of the soundtrack for her films. Her work has received numerous awards and has been presented worldwide.
In 2012, she created a female collective that directed Doclisboa for two editions, establishing new sections such as Cinema of Urgency and Passages (Documentary & Contemporary Art). She is a co-founder of the production company Kintop. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts-Video, and teaches at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon.
Trevor Mathison is an artist, composer, sound designer, and recordist. His sonic practice – centered on creating fractured, haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music – has featured in over thirty award-winning films and installations. Trevor was a founding member of the cine-cultural artist collective The Black Audio Film Collective (1982 -1998), where his sonic designs defined and situated the Collective’s audiovisual works, including Signs of Empire (1983), Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Last Angel of History (1996). He has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from BAFC (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and David Lawson) creating sound design for numerous documentaries and installations. With Anna Piva and Edward George, he formed the projects “Flow Motion” and “Hallucinator”, whose mutant techno dub featured on the leading record label Chain Reaction. In recent years Trevor has produced a series of artworks and album releases as part of the ongoing and iterative project From Signal to Decay.
Gary Stewart is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sound, moving image and computational creativity. His work examines social and political issues of identity, culture, and technology. Through the application of innovative technologies and practices, he is part of a global network of collaborators who are advocates for equality, climate justice and better health through the arts especially those from marginalised communities. Operating through a range of theoretical, fictional, and artistic frames, his work traverses media art, experimental music, and research. Under the moniker of Bantu, Gary sets out to explore and bring fresh new perspectives and in particular to “Black Noise”. Batu’s recent release Instability (2024) draws upon both personal experience and collective trauma – that of a diaspora subjected to the rigours of a prolonged “hostile environment”.
As Dubmorphology, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart create installations and performances that incorporate elements of dub and musique concrète which functions as a binding agent for disparate visual material that is bound together by what might be dubbed “post-soul noise”.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a writer, theorist, composer and filmmaker whose practice is mainly positioned within the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies. Born in Hanoi, she emigrated to the US during the Vietnam War, where she studied music composition, ethnomusicology and French literature. While teaching in Dakar, Senegal, she created her first film, Reassemblage (1982), which documents the lives of women in rural Senegal in a manner that she famously described as “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” the subjects she portrays. She has consistently challenged the traditional documentary format and has been deconstructing normative ways of looking at and listening to different cultures, whilst being dedicated to questioning totalizing systems of knowledge and categories of identity. She considers each work to exist as a “boundary event,” eluding labels such as documentary, fiction or experimental film, instead positioning her work between these designations. Alongside audiovisual works, she has published numerous essays and books on cinema, cultural politics, feminism and the arts. She is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.