The Forbidden Music
Facts
- Contact person:
- Nicholas Baroncelli Torretta
- Financer:
-
- Crafoordska Stiftelsen
- Responsible at MaU:
- Nicholas Baroncelli Torretta
- Project members at MaU:
- Time frame:
- 01 June 2024 - 28 February 2026
- Faculty/department:
- Research environment :
- Research subject:
-
- Arts-based Research
- Design
About the project
In 1977 NASA sent to space a disc representing the music and sounds of Earth. Who defines and decides which songs and sounds can represent our planet? Throughout history, many musical expressions have been forbidden and marginalized. The usual way of forbidding musical expressions has been to forbid their musical instruments. Despite their criminalization, these instruments and their music have resisted and given rise to new instruments and types of music.
- How can we tell a different story about music and musical instruments, one that represents and brings to the fore the kinds of music from the margins?
- How can we, from forbidden music perspectives come together and create another way of sharing histories through new instruments and new sounds?
- What is the sound of the Earth when the voice is not only of the powerful?
The Forbidden Music project brings together plural expressions of forbidden music to co-create new instruments and music. The goal is to explore how these expressions of resistance can come together and create instruments that connect, strengthen and sustain the plural expressions of forbidden musics around the world. The project runs through five open participatory design workshops and ends with an interactive exhibition.
The final exhibition will take place in late 2025 and will invite the public to engage with the created instruments, present stories from the different perspectives that were part of the process and hold space for conversations around the oppression of designed objects and cultures of resistance surrounding the intersection of music and design.