Jazz-Schmiede, Düsseldorf
23/08/2026
Klangraum 2026
A work in 3 movements: listening, remembering, sounding.
Performed by Klangraum 2026 participants, as part of ‘Emmnauelle invites’ on the last day.
This participatory work is inspired by Walter Benjamin lost diagrams of primal acquaintances mentioned in “ ‘A Berlin Chronicle (1932).
Klangraum 2026 composers
my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous - situations. “A Berlin Chronicle, Walter Benjamin (1932).
Score
1/ A voice speaks, we listen, a few words linger
I read a few short quotes about friendships gathered from Laura C. Forster & Joel White’s Friends in Common (2025) and Luce Irigaray, To be two, 2000)
2/ A voice speaks, we dream, we remember.
I lead a short meditation to conjure up and visualise our primal acquaintances past and present. Then we each draw a diagram of these friendships past and present.
3/ We sound the diagram of our primal acquaintances.
We use the map of our foundational connections as a score for a song of gratitude. dedicated to those that made us who you are today.
diagrams of primal acquaintances
Formal or informal, long-lasting and fleeting, intimate and anonymous, fraught and infuriating, friendship is central to ways of being in the world, and to remaking it. (Friends in Common, Laura C. Forster & Joel White, 2025)
Our relationships are the practice ground of our artistic, musical, personal and activist work.
I first experimented with Benjamin’s concept for our third Social P(a)lace At common Palace, (05 /04 /2026) exploring the idea of Radical Friendship as a sustaining force capable of inducing personal and social change in our community,
I led participants through playful exercises to conjure up and visualise their lives, not as a linear series of events, but as a web, or spiral of significant encounters with others past and present, real and imagined, local or remote, that made them who they are today.
My own map of primal acquaintances first appeared in The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin published by Sharon Kivland imprint (Ma bibliothéque, 2017) now in its second edition and available here
my diagram of primal acquaintances used for Social P(a)lace poster.