Spanning art, technology and science, Victoria Pham is an Australian artist, evolutionary biologist, writer and composer based between Paris and Sydney. Originally trained as an archaeologist, she is a current PhD candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, St John’s College. Victoria is the Artistic Director of FABLE ARTS, lead artist in the RE:SOUNDING project with James Nguyen, co-lead artist in the collective SONANT BODIES with James Hazel, and host and producer of podcast series DECLASSIFY.
Victoria’s Sounds Unheard Studio Talk series, “The Practice of Listening”, is an exploration of different models of how we engage with sound from a broad range of perspectives: musical, meditative, archaeological and speculative.
“Listening Backwards” focuses on how we can contemplate music making through historical objects, documents and listening. Victoria presents a case study in the form of her RE:SOUNDING project with artist and filmmaker James Nguyen. Together Victoria and James worked with a range of collaborators to find a variety of sounds in a 3000-year-old bronze drum called the Đông Sơn drum, creating new music with an ancient instrument. Through this process of rematriation, RE:SOUNDING asks important questions about ownership, access and how we can continue to make music from the roots of those questions.
For more on the RE:SOUNDING project, please visit https://dongsonarchive.com/
Thank you for joining us for the third episode of Victoria’s Studio Talks series. Join us next Thursday for the final episode with Victoria, examining the idea of ‘listening to the now’. For more information on Victoria’s work in music and archaeology, visit https://www.victoriaavpham.com/.
Tags: Composer Composing composition james nguyen rematriation Victoria Pham
