meLê yamomo (Panel)
he/she/they/siya
thu May 29 | Goethe-Institut
meLê yamomo composes with time itself—stretching, layering, and bending it into new sonic landscapes. His work is not simply about sound, but about the ghosts that inhabit it, the histories it carries, and the futures it dares to imagine. Born in the currents of migration, his life has unfolded across Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, Munich, and now between Amsterdam and Berlin where he moves fluidly between composing, academic scholarship, and theatre-making, dissolving the boundaries between research and artistic practice.
Through his artistic and sonic labor in music-theatre, radio, podcasts, and performance, and as curator of the Decolonial Frequencies Festival, yamomo invites us into a world where listening is resistance, where sound becomes a map to hidden pasts and possible futures. “Sometimes,” he says, “you only have to listen.”
About the artist
For yamomo, sound is a portal. His book Sounding Modernities traces how music and theatre shaped colonial identities in the Asia Pacific, while his compositions unearth voices from sonic archives, allowing them to reverberate once more. His compositions, do not merely represent sound—they materialize it, making it pulse through bodies, histories, and spaces.
Awarded the prestigious Open Ear Award and the KNAW Early Career Award, yamomo’s work is a study in sonic entanglements—a decolonial choreography of echoes and silences. In Echoing Europe, historical recordings shift from museum objects into haunting performances, reminding us that sound is never neutral—it is a witness, a weapon, a memory.
meLê yamomo will be part of the pre-performance panel: Interferences: Live - On Glitches, static, and Sonic Histories. The panel is co-developed in collaboration between Sieve Bonaiuti, meLê yamomo, Leonie Schmidt and Zoë Horsten. It’s supported by Goethe-Institut, ASCA and AYA.
Access to the panel is included in the ticket for the Thursday May 29 performance
