The score is as follows:
Listen carefully.
The audience is your instrument, play it in order to practically understand how we are generally instrumentalised.
Prepare the audience with concepts, questions and movements as a way to explore the dissonance that exists between the individual narcissism that capitalism promotes and our social capacity; between how we conceive ourselves as free individuals with agency and the way that we are socially determined by capitalist relations, technology, and ideology.
Reflect on the I/We relation while defining social dissonance.
Help the collective subject to emerge.
Social Dissonance is a collective improvisation, a participatory performance, a strange concert. Starting from the above score, it creates a context for a collaborative, experimental investigation into the unfreedom and instrumentalisation under capitalist social relations, and the embedding in processes of mediation – economic, social, linguistic, and more.
Social Dissonance was first performed at documenta 14 in 2017.
A workshop on the themes of the performance, drawing on Mattin’s book Social Dissonance (Urbanomic, 2022), will take place at ICI Berlin earlier the same day. Please sign up for the workshop here.
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his collaborative practice, writing and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. He has exhibited and performed worldwide including documenta14 (Athens and Kassel), Performa (NYC), Shanghai Biennial, Arika (Glasgow), Galerias Municipais (Lisbon) and Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). In 2022, Urbanomic/MIT Press published his book Social Dissonance and in 2012, CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconsitituted Praxis. Along with Anthony Iles he has edited the books Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009) and Abolishing Capitalist Totality (Minor Compositions 2026). Since 2020, he co-hosts the podcast Social Discipline with Miguel Prado. Prado and Mattin are also part of Noise Research Union (NRU) with Cécile Malaspine, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi, Patricia Reed and Inigo Wilkins. He has taught and lectured in institutions such as Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University, Dutch Arts Institute and HDK-Valand. Mattin is an associate professor at the Tromsø Academy of Arts at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway.
In English
With
Mattin
Organized by
Nicolas Helm-Grovas and José Antonio Magalhães
How to Attend
- At the venue: To attend in person, please register using the form below.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.
Still from Social Dissonance (video), documenta14, Athens, 2017.
Mattin. No rights reserved.