What?
Three days of concerts, talks and parties focusing on electronic music from Africa and the African diaspora, on cultural globalisation and possible futures in sound and discourse. Three days of exploring a world between urban, rural and digital spaces, both unhinged and rapidly growing together. Three days between artistic proposals and dialogue, between local scenes and global markets, between electronic music’s radical outposts and some of the most exciting club sounds on the planet.
It is breathtaking how the current hype around African music and the sophisticated Western market’s hunger for art from “outside the crystal palace” coincide with stricter immigration regimes and the resurgence of reactionary concepts of cultural identity. There seems to be a strong yearning for rupture and an outside world beyond our commodified and industrialised culture, its simultaneous stagnation and dizzying pace, its anxiety and isolated individuality. But this yearning cannot be satisfied on a symbolic level alone. Digging the Global South proposes to exchange an imaginary Real for actual encounters, to discover a shared reality and reinforce a sense of departure.
In conversations with musicians, record producers, and journalists, Digging the Global South explores ambiguities, exclusions, and emancipatory potentials emerging in the process of cultural global- isation. It gives insight into a complex African-diasporic modernity and critically engages with the Western desires and projections it faces.
Thomas GläßerCologne, October 2017
AboutArtistsProgramScheduleInfo