Music & Talk

Garth Erasmus is a visual artist, musician, audio artist, activist, community worker and instrument maker. He studied visual arts at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. In the 1980s, he was part of the artistic anti-apartheid movement and helped establish several organizations emerging from the townships that saw art as a weapon of political work. Erasmus co-founded the influential artist group Vakalisa and Greatmore Street Artists Studios. Erasmus creates his works against the backdrop of the present and history of South Africa’s indigenous population, the KhoiSan, to which he belongs. He challenges the hegemonic constructions of the “coloured identity”, which are based on exclusion and continue to impact society, even after the end of apartheid. Through his exploration of pre-colonial history, he re-appropriates indigenous knowledge by transforming the musical bow of the KhoiSan – central to his work and found in ethnological museums – into an electrified hypermodern tool. As a musician, he plays in several improvisation and free jazz ensembles and is co-founder of the activist music and poetry group Khoi Khonnexion. His work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, USA, as well as the Artscape Theater and the Robben Island Museum, Cape Town.

Stefan Schneider lives in Düsseldorf. From 1988 to 1993 he studied photography with Prof. Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, graduating as a master student. Since 1994 he has been working in the field of electronic music. He is a founding member of the bands Kreidler (1994 – 1999) and To Rococo Rot (1995 – 2014). Musical collaborations include Joachim Roedelius (Cluster), Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Bill Wells, Arto Lindsay, Sofia Jernberg, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, Katharina Grosse, and Susanna Gartmayer. He publishes solo works under the name mapstation. He has released album productions on labels such as Mute, Domino, City Slang, Staubgold, Bureau-b, and TAL. At the invitation of the Goethe Institute Nairobi and UNESCO, he has produced extensive field recordings of traditional folk music in Kenya since 2011. In 2016, he launched the record label TAL. Schneider is also active as a curator (RUHRTRIENNALE 21 and 22 – WEGE PROJEKT – audio guide through the city of Duisburg and its inner harbor. THEATER DER WELT Festival, Düsseldorf 2021 – Nine music events with musicians from Japan, Greece, Kenya, USA, Belgium, Venezuela, Brazil. HOMBROICH : RAKETENFESTIVAL 2022 – Festival for electronic and experimental music on the Museum Island Hombroich, Neuss. MANCHMAL ARTET ES AUS in MUSIK – an exhibition about Conrad Schnitzler (1937 – 2011) at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).

At the centre of Peter Thiessen’s work is the relationship of sound and music to language. With the lyrics, he explores various states of the “in-between”, the ghostly, the spectral and the zombified. For Sand !HÅ« Sand he has developed a series of musical pieces dealing with the largest known pile of sand: the planet Mars. Using the materials occurring on Mars – sand, metal, dry ice and water – he has composed a speculative soundtrack in which the agency of inanimate matter becomes audible. Thiessen is the singer, songwriter and guitarist of the Hamburg band Kante and was the bassist of the band Blumfeld from 1997 to 2002.