Framed as an exploratory workshop, Beyond Monumentality takes as its point of departure the ways in which monuments serve to construct common national histories and narratives, and moves beyond that to consider and excavate the narratives that are unwanted, erased, or overlooked.
Moving from the center of the city to the fringes and peripheries of Amman, Beyond Monumentality is articulated around a series of collective listening sessions facilitated by artist Vincent Chomaz. The project refers to listening as a mode of associative investigation bridging conscious and unconscious knowledge. It focuses on field listening and associative listening to unravel the relation between the soundscapes of the city and official and non-official social and political narratives.
This workshop is part of the second phase of our 2019 program at The Lab, bringing together artists and cultural practitioners from various backgrounds to look at the postcolonial context we inhabit through the metaphor of arrival and departure. Long shaped by forced diasporas and migratory flows, Amman will be approached as a living archive offering fertile ground for a conceptual and poetic archaeology of place.
Vincent Chomaz is an artist and cultural operator interested in associative and informal forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning installations, workshops, publications, formats of co-production, and interventions, his work focuses on listening as a social, political, and aesthetic practice—an associative and empathic tool to investigate collective dynamics as a network of subjective narratives and memories.
From 2012 to 2014, Chomaz co-founded and co-directed EXPO, a not-for-profit art space located in Berlin-Neukölln. He has since recurrently collaborated with the Berlin-based initiative Zona Dynamic, developing formats based on ideas of co-production and co-exchange, such as Pala Lab_Collective Affairs, a temporary laboratory aimed to reflect upon the nature of collaboration and its politics, or the Zona Sessions, a structure for cross-disciplinary exchange and collaborative research bridging Amman and Berlin.
Vincent Chomaz's participation is kindly supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.