SAVVY Contemporary: Today, I Broke your Solar System. On Partition and Partitura

Long Night of Ideas

This long night of pondering on Partition and Partitura takes as its starting point the partition between Pakistan and India, which led to East and West Pakistan´s independence from colonial Britain, when approximately 14 million people were forced into migration, flying ethnic cleansing, rape, mass murder. This historical event remains one of the largest forced migrations in human history. The making of partitions that lead or respond to migration, of dividing or being divided, of borders, walls, frontiers, fences, gates, barriers, whether physical or immaterial, crosses cultures, times and geographies.

While we want to take a moment to focus on what it is that drives the political impulse to divide and rule, we also want to think about what other present we could imagine if we turned partitions on their heads. What if partitions, these ongoing redistributions of parts, just remained as the etymologies of other words, of partitas (from the Italian partitura) to just exist instead as musical scores, spaces of sounds, transnational sounds, sounds that have forgotten and overcome nations, that unfurl in porous interstices?

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The events take place in the context of the Long Night of Ideas in cooperation with Auswärtiges Amt.