CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is inspired by Allen Hynek’s categorisation of UFO witnesses.

Hynek proposed three steps:

Step 1 — Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
Step 2 — Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
Step 3 — The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.

::: More about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: SLEMANI SOUNDS :::

In September 2023 Social Recordings — alongside local historian Chia Sadeeq — wandered the streets of Slemani (Kurdistan, North Iraq) to capture the movements of craftspeople and to record the noises they produce. These craftspeople’s lives and everyday labour create the rhythm of the city — a polyphonic sonic richness.

The project is an ode to the diversity of sound in a contemporary Iraqi city. It is a sound ethnography of a place, made in relation with its people who are simultaneously senders and receivers within a shared resonant space. It takes a pulse of the politics of a place where craft is disappearing due to encroaching capitalism.

How do the producers of these work-specific “soundtracks” listen to the daily soundscape to which they also contribute? How is the sonic output of the city degrading in the face of changing and dissolving working techniques and traditional labour in general?

A first presentation took place during the SPACE 21 festival for experimental music in Slemani, in April 2024. It was also a time to revisit the people who had been documented the previous September, in their habitats or workshops, and to play back the recordings that had been made of them, on location. This shared listening experience of the previous recording was recorded again, to commemorate a common recollection.

For the third chapter of Close Encounters, Out of Sight presents an audio-visual performance and installation, a new one-off edit of Slemani Sounds bringing into dialogue — as an act of feedback — the sounds and images recorded during both visits. Hardi Kurda and Ernst Maréchal give an improvisational concert, intertwining the sounds of the installation with live sounds, complemented by recordings of their previous Slemani/Space 21 duo performances.

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Realised with the support of: Flanders — State of the Art

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Find our more about the artists HERE

Artists: Ernst Maréchal, Hardi Kurda