Community and History in Music and Sound  

Voyages through alternative traditions, sonic mythologies and collective legacies 

maat Mode 2020: The Wrap-up — Episode 2 

With maat Mode 2020 we inaugurated a series of guest-curated programmes and collaborations — Terra Irada, Atypical Traditions, among others — that explore how musical traditions of varied geographic provenance and experimental nature illuminate new readings of cultural contaminations, both as critique and celebration of a fluctuating post-global world. These voices contribute to deepen understandings of how decolonizing agendas and post-colonial discourse, particularly with relevance to the intricate legacies that traverse and depart from Portugal’s past, reverberate in the contested social and political territories of the present. They support and vocalize the positions of long-lasting communities, around unchallenged racial narratives and cries for emancipation.

Through the history of fado, creole rap, Angolan music and the electronic scene of African expanse, we have discovered stories of newfound independence, self-realisation and individual liberation all the while voyaging across the neighbourhoods of greater Lisbon and into experimental storytelling capable of collapsing visual and sonic imports into new interpretations — odes to an everchanging ultra-globalised society.

Beatrice Leanza
maat Director