"Salam Godzilla" (Gilles Aubry, 40'. in progress), Preview

Built in 1946, the cinema Salam in Agadir is one of the few buildings that survived the dramatic 1960 earthquake. Shot inside the cinema and in the surroundings of Agadir, the film is a poetic meditation accross local histories and temporalities. It questions the material logic of technologies such as the seismograph and the gramophone, privileging instead embodied forms of listening and knowing. Next to footages of the earthquake, the film excavates an account of the event by Soussi poet Ibn Ighil, reinterpreted by singer Ali Faiq. Survival anxieties also surface in the contemplation of dinosaur footprints on a beach nearby Agadir, echoing the movie « Godzilla » (Japan/US, 1954), which was screened inside the cinema on the night of the earthquake.
Participants: Lahcen Aattar, Ali Bazegra, Samir Benteyane, Ali Faiq, Dounia Fikri, Abderrahim Nidalha, Jafri Yazza.

Gilles Aubry is a sound artist, musician and researcher living in Berlin since 2002. The exploration of sound technological practices, cultural conventions, and political systems is quite typical for his artistic practice, which mostly relies on archival research and ethnographic methods. Many of his works scrutinize audio recording as a technology of the colonizer and trace its progressive appropriation by the colonized cultures. This has led to pieces exploring the materiality of sound practices in Christian pentecostal communities in Kinshasa, and in Bollywood film studios in Mumbai. His documenta14 radio piece is a collaboration with Robert Millis dramatizing the practices of pioneer colonialist recording industries in India in their attempts to market exotic musical cultures. Other works examine the scientific paradigms embedded in early Western sound archives such as the Lautarchiv in Berlin and the French Speech Archives in Paris, problematizing their naturalist and often racist ideological foundations. His current research focuses on situated sound practices and imaginaries in Morocco, exploring the relations between indigenous cultures, colonial sound technologies and environmental voices.

gilles aubry