AZMARI; Erythro’Poïesie
‘Locative media’ help us make sense of how local knowledge and experiences of public space intersect with other locales around the world.
More and more locative media creators relate to the global crises of our contemporary world: climate change and forced migration as the locally-global (‘glocal’) issues. Both are planetary issues that force us to reckon with global forces at local scales. Both are issues that require us to think and adapt across these scales.
The glocal work of new technology artist and anthropologist Sylvie Marchand focuses on migration, nomadism and hospitality, often through sound walks and in a collaboration with migrants. Her newest project (in progress) Azmari refers to the Habesha (Abyssinian) storytelling poets.
Sylvie Marchand came into contact with the music and texts of these artists who fled their country because of the ongoing Eritrean dictatorship.
She first started the Hospitality in Actions project where the urgency was to give back to these artists the full range of their art by manufacturing Abyssinian musical instruments (krars).
This was extended into a locative media project as a plea for the cause of refugees, for inclusion in the face of racism and as a means of shedding light on an essential part of our contemporary history, to show how much the presence of “the foreigner who comes” (Michel Agier) is a chance for all; because it is crucial to give a voice to the artists who arrive, because it is vital to listen to them, and because it is urgent to reinvent, with them, the polyphonies of the world.
Azmari’s artistic material is the fruit of exchanges between all people involved over a period of three years, whether or not they have migrated, united by the desire to reinvent the territories of art and the languages of humanity. Together these artists calligraphy the earth, drawing a network of energies, desires, skills and visions that unite us beyond borders.
Among other resources (live concerts, interactive books and immersive installations), Azmari provides a geolocated storytelling device brought together by the CGeomap software developed by Fred Adam and Jacques Bigot.
Along multilingual sound walks, people on the go will be listening to poems, stories, testimonies and sung oral literature created from the poetry of the world.
