Decolonizing Sonic Public Art: Max Siedentopf and the Herero-Namaqua Genocide

How does sonic art and its listening subject embody, reinforce, or reproduce institutional ideologies, social values, or political economies? As sound and music scholars argue: hearing is biological, listening is cultural. Beyond asking metaphorical and material definitions of sonic art, this paper examines who makes sound, who listens, and what cultural boundaries and restraints circumscribing sonic artworks manifest implicitly and explicitly. The paper analyzes a six-channel sound installation by German-Namibian artist Max Siedentopf, Toto Forever(2019), which amplifies the 1980s colonialist anthem “Africa,” in perpetuity, into the Namib desert, located along the borders of South Africa, Angola, and Namibia. Interpreted as a joke, “Toto Forever” was featured by CNN, NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Vice, and ultimately dubbed: “worst sound installation ever.” However, unmoored from gallows of internet humor ecology, the piece is more than a trollish ‘post-internet art’ gesture: it exploits the site-specific traumas of the German Imperial domination of Namibia between 1884-1919, resulting in the harrowing Herero-Namaqua genocide of 1904-1908, in which thousands of members of the indigenous farming community were murdered or left to starve in the desert. The desert now serves as a memorial burial ground – and as a site for Toto Forever. I propose that sonic art historymust attend to the intersecting frameworks that ground sonic art practiceswithin a politics of listening, and will discuss how Siedentopf’s work embodies a networked digital spectatorship, ongoing colonial ideologies of violence, and sonic geopolitics in contexts of genocide, repatriation, white supremacy, and contested public space.