Upcycling and the reuse of everyday objects are part of our daily lives in Europe. Hacking consumer electronics to make sound is essential to our music practice. Including these methods in our short-term research and art residency at the Dekandoo Center in Gandiol/St. Louis in Northern Senegal, we developed musical instruments made from trashed objects like an old sewing machine or broken bicycles. Brief research on traditional West African music, residing at the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar and some lucky encounters in St. Louis, as well as the peculiar and limited material collected in Gandiol, formed the resulting objects. Inspired by the variety of traditional music and communication instruments in West Africa, these objects became new sonic interpretations of the environment as we perceived it.
Finally, our stay closed with a one-day workshop in collaboration with the Jangkom Artist space in St. Louis. “Leppate loo gis jumtukaayu mbuug la” (= Wolof for “Everything is a music instrument”)
Jangkom, St. Louis, Senegal, 26.2.24
Would you like to hack a radio to make it a synthesizer? Or maybe learn some basics of soldering and coding to make sound with a microprocessor? What about an electric toy guitar from a canister and broomstick? If you like funny sounds and you have your idea for an instrument of the future, come and ask how they can help you with that!
Dekandoo resident artists Eugenia Seriakov and Francesco Zedde invite you to an open laboratory to showcase their work and share some tricks!
Using methods of African traditional musical instruments, we build new items with recycled material and everyday objects. The open laboratory invites you to join the process and to build your own.
