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Matana Roberts

Matana Roberts

  • about
  • Artist Statement
  • newsletter
  • coda
    • contact

At the core of my multidisciplinary work is sound.

Sight as sound, sound as sight, whether seen, felt or embodied…interchangeable with an ease only true memory knows.

Sound also as physical force, as social practice, and as a carrier of memory. I approach sound not only as something heard, but as something that motions through body, reorganizes attention, and structures collective experience over time. My practice unfolds across installation, performative aspects, and listening as witness…hearing beyond sight lines… I see sound and vision always the primary conditions through which sonic meaning emerges.

I treat sound as an embodied phenomenon. It is felt through breath, posture, vibration, and duration, shaping how the nervous system regulates itself and how perception is formed. Motion in my work is not illustrative but investigative, a way of studying how sound is absorbed, resisted, and metabolized by the body. Through sustained physical practice, long-duration performance, improvisatory exploration, I explore how repetition,ritual and variation alter awareness, and how cognition arises through sensation as well as abstraction.

My thinking is informed by perspectives drawn from folk traditions, neuroscience, systems theory, and storytelling. I am currently particularly interested in feedback loops: how small shifts accumulate, how complex patterns emerge, and how adaptive systems reorganize themselves under changing ritual like conditions. Improvisation functions here as a rigorous methodology, an active negotiation between structure and uncertainty, memory and immediacy. What may appear intuitive is often the result of deeply embedded internal architectures shaped over time.

My self study intersects with a deep engagement in experimental music and diasporic performance traditions, where sound operates as both cultural inheritance and political technology. I draw from practices that treat listening as a collective act and from historical materials that reveal how power, ideology, and identity are encoded in rhythm, language, and silence. Text, sound, and gesture are often placed in tension, allowing meaning to fragment, recur, or accumulate across duration.

I aim to create immersive listening environments rather than fixed narratives. I invite witness into shifting perceptual fields where sound, image, and action circulate, overlap, and interfere with one another. Ritualized acts of repetition, disruption, and reconfiguration function as ways of examining how individuals and groups process information, negotiate contradiction, and encounter truth as something unstable and embodied.

Ultimately, my work asks how listening can be retrained, how sound might rewire perception, change sight, recalibrate the nervous system, and open new possibilities for being together. By constructing environments where sound is felt as much as heard, I aim to create conditions in which attention slows, awareness sharpens, and new forms of collective understanding can emerge.

Matana Roberts 2017 ©