Re-enacting Archives "Smetak's Inventions"

28.02.2019 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Tomomi Adachi, Walter Smetak

The publication Smetak’s Inventions marks the conclusion of “Re-inventing Smetak”, a project focusing on Swiss-Brazilian composer Walter Smetak. The project was developed between 2014 and 2017 by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and Ensemble Modern in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. The publication features Smetak’s original texts, translated for the first time into English, as well as numerous manuscripts and photos.
Walter Smetak was a fellow of the residency program in 1982. Comprehensive research on his work united documents from the archives of the Smetak family and the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin program. Beyond portraying Smetak’s unique artistic world, the publication is also the result of an intensive bilateral cultural exchange and understanding aimed at expanding and correcting the view of a Eurocentric historiography of contemporary music. The project is especially significant in the context of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program’s work since it grew out of an intensive examination of its own archival material and as a re-enactment, so to speak, of the archive itself.
Julia Gerlach, the initiator of the project and the book’s editor, joins Silvia Fehrmann, director of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, in a conversion on working with archives, alternative historiographies, and creating the book.
The conversation will be followed by a solo performance by Tomomi Adachi that is linked musically to the Smetak project. The experimental electronic music composer-performer and instrument maker was a BKP fellow in 2012 and was commissioned to create a composition as part of the realization of the Smetak project.
Furthermore excerpts from Walter Pinto Limas documentary “O alquimista do som” (1978) will be screened.

The book Smetak’s Inventions is published by wolke Verlag and was designed by Andreas Koch.

Conversation in German
free admission