HFBK

Tapiwa Svosve

A concert-lecture that traces frequencies in Black radical sound, weaving improvisation, historical praxis, and collaborative performance into a study of how music and memory carry political resonance.

Tapiwa Svosve (b.⁠ ⁠1995) is a musician and theorist whose multidisciplinary practice brings sound into dialogue with theatre, painting, and historical inquiry. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Svosve’s work enjoys a unique temperament that spans extreme avant-gardism, free jazz, and noise music. Thinking through silence, negative space, solo performance, and the negotiations between body and instrument, he adapts music and sound to develop various physical and performative techniques. A longtime organiser in Switzerland’s experimental music scene, he has used public spaces to locate and explore the boundaries between commercial, theatrical, and underground communities. In 2024, he was awarded the Swiss Music Prize.

How the series resonates Monster, Minor, Margin: Performance as Study curated by Kandis Williams with the Extended Library
The Extended Library treats performance as a form of knowledge production—an embodied practice that translates lived experience into public study. This series explores how Black performers stage negotiations between identity, humor, sonic experimentation, various audience recognitions including negotiating sterreotyping. These negotiations are additionally made in spaces that have very different demands of the performer from independent, theatre, film and commercial spaces. With Thelma Buabeng’s comedic/cabaret solo performance (Tell Me Nothing From The Horse) and Tapiwa Svosve’s concert-lecture with guest collaborator Tobechukwu Onwukeme (Forensic Architecture), exploring through-lines of frequencies in Black radical sound, the program opens a window into how performance formats create and contest meaning. Both practices show how performance operates as critique, pedagogy, and archive at once. These events resonate directly with my concurrent seminar, Monster, Minor, Margin: Black Body / Being / Performance in Archive and Media, which examines the circulation and contestation of highly aestheticized Black figures in culture.