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What Touches us Most (Audio)

Jan 28, 2020
Created by Mwangi Hutter (2017). Introduced by Karen Werner.
What Touches Us Most is by Mwangi Hutter, an artist duo based in both Berlin and Nairobi producing work under the combination of their surnames and biographies. They describe their combined identity “as a creative strategy to resist fixed notions of identity based upon gender, race, and cultural backgrounds.... Their works can be seen as a vision of unification and the pacification of contrasts: female-male, African-European, black-white and the borders separating you and me.” Mwangi Hutter produced What Touches Us Most in 2017 –the piece was commissioned and broadcast as part of Documenta, the German contemporary art exhibition that takes place every 5 years. Documenta 2017 was unique in its showcasing of radio art including seventeen commissions of new radio art works broadcast in partnership with local radio stations in Greece, Cameroon, Colombia, Lebanon, Indonesia, the United States, and Germany, creating a worldwide exhibition on air. Here is Documenta’s description of the piece: “What Touches Us Most brings together many of the vocal characters, soundscapes, and acoustic themes developed by Mwangi Hutter over the past two decades. Earlier sounds and characters speak of wildness and isolation, experiences arising from a dualistic splitting of the self and the Other. A babble of voices resounds, intent on humorous discussion. Newer themes convey an atmosphere of yearning and rapture. The piece renders audible the spaces of memory and expression, moving from the past into the future. It is an invitation to wander through these indefinite locations, awakening an awareness of the possibility of going beyond difference to express oneness.”