https://hangar.org/es/agenda-hangar/to-become-liquid/

On January 21, Lamin Fofana presents To Become Liquid within the program To Be Made Instrument, which is part of the Audioformal–Politics of Listening research-action line.

To Become Liquid functions as the opening of the album Corps Perdu (upcoming), leaving the door ajar toward a forthcoming trilogy of sound works that form part of a long-term project provisionally titled Surrounding World. Conceived as a process in continuous becoming, the project deliberately resists closure or a definitive final form. Its development unfolds dialogically through performance, installation, object-based presentation, music, and radio.

The practice centers on the creation of immersive, multisensory sound environments, informed and inspired by the reading of conceptually dense and historically rich texts from the tradition of Black Studies, as well as from seminal historians, poets, and theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Dionne Brand, Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Suzanne Césaire, and Aimé Césaire. While the works often engage with the turbulent uncertainties of the present, sound—the project’s primary medium—consistently carries a historical consciousness. The resulting form is a poetic and unexpected montage, whose most recent iteration is Corps Perdu.

Corps Perdu extends an ongoing practice of transmuting text into sound. This gesture embraces an inherent vulnerability—approximations, displacements, and potential misreadings—and is guided by an ethic of close, careful, and intentional reading, which in turn extends to listening as an active and alert practice. The title Corps Perdu is drawn from Aimé Césaire’s 1948 book of poetry, illustrated by Pablo Picasso. The album attends to a transitional moment in Césaire’s poetic trajectory, when the mercurial fervor of youth begins to be reshaped by the elegiac introspection of time and maturity. Abrupt violence and unfulfilled desires permeate the ten-track suite, which unfolds in a fugal structure.

In To Become Liquid, a multisensory listening space is proposed in which performance, collective reading, and open dialogue converge. The aim is to generate an environment of critical reverie—an intentional listening space that enables dreaming, thinking, imagining, and the articulation of voice and sound. The work allows for moments of irruption that disrupt flow or narrative, opening onto collective experiences of alternative modes of listening and foregrounding nonlinear forms of thought and perception.

The performance emerges from a sustained reflection on collective reading and intentional listening. Reading is approached as a form of listening and observation, while listening itself is articulated as an active, non-passive engagement with sound and the surrounding world.

During To Become Liquid, pages or fragments from a body of texts are circulated among the audience, inviting participants to read aloud at any moment throughout the performance. The intention is to cultivate an active, collaborative space that resists disengaged or purely relaxed modes of reception, fostering instead a shared and attentive participation.