“First of all, the song hears something in you and you’ve let yourself hear what the song hears in you. In advance of the proper name, in advance of the geography, in advance of the history, like before you know any of those things. If you follow that, if you let yourself go with that, there is no telling where you will end up. If you follow the music, and years later you find yourself sitting somewhere, and you’re like: “How did I get here?” It’s ‘cause you followed, you followed the music which heard something in you which you yourself did not know of. But you followed it. You let yourself follow it. And so, when that happens, and when the music hears something in you that is more than you know about yourself, more than you have a language for. If you can follow that unknown language then you are embarked on the understanding that you yourself are an Afrosonic mapping. You yourself are also an itinerary of a circumnavigatory experience. In other words, a song is inherently diasporic. And so are you, but you don’t know it yet. Stuck on the dancefloor in New York, or the dancefloor in Douala, you don’t necessarily know that. You think you know it, but the song knows more than you.”
― Kodwo Eshun
Kodwo Eshun is filmmaker, theoreticus en kunstenaar, gevestigd in Londen. Hij is docent hedendaagse kunsttheorie bij Goldsmiths, Department of Visual Cultures, University of London en hoogleraar beeldende kunst aan de Haut Ecole d'Art et Design, Genève. In 2002 richtte hij samen met Anjalika Sagar The Otolith Group op, een collectief dat zich bezighoudt met film en video, kunstenaarsteksten en het samenstellen van tentoonstellingen. Ehsun is de auteur van ‘More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction’ en heeft geschreven voor publicaties zoals The Guardian, The Wire en Frieze.