Jacqueline Saki Aslan

KILAMS FOR KOFFERKINDER (‘SUITCASE CHILDREN’) BETWEEN CASABLANCA AND KURDISTAN

CHAIR
Thomas Levin

This lecture performance weaves together research on cassette letters as a transnational medium of communication (1970s–1990s) with artistic practice. At its center are family organization through cassette recordings and the acoustic heritage of lament songs (Kilams) preserved on these tapes. The stories of so-called ‘suitcase children’ and collective singing practices reveal how cassette letters sustained family networks across geographical distances – and how listening sessions in many communities have long been vital social events.

The performance explores the dramaturgy of these cassettes: from A- and B-sides to the rituals of collective listening, loops, repetition, and emotional encoding. It highlights not only the historical and medial dimensions of cassette letters but also the sensory and affective experiences shaped by the act of listening itself.

Artistically, the lecture performance combines this research with spoken word, live sound excerpts, and the figure of the ‘ghost choir’ as a symbol of collective memory and absence. It builds a bridge between the analogue era of cassette letters and contemporary practices such as voice messages in social media, reflecting on the healing function of lament songs as a sonic archive of grief, migration, and resistance.

The lecture performance draws on the artist’s Master’s thesis and ongoing PhD research on cassette letters as
documents of transnational migration and connects to earlier installations, sound pieces, and workshops with cassette recorders that intertwine research, art, and community work.

Jacqueline Saki Aslan is a performance artist, education and migration researcher, lecturer at the University of Cologne (Aesthetic Education, Department of Art & Music), and PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her artistic practice combines performance, sound, text, and installation, engaging with themes such as classism, transgenerationality, and memory culture. Her works have been presented at festivals, theatres, museums, and art spaces. Internationally, she has worked in critical education and cultural mediation, including at the 11th Berlin Biennale. A recurring motif in her artistic research is the cassette recorder as a medium of memory and voice.

Thomas Y. Levin is a media theorist, curator,
collector and professor at Princeton University. The translator and/or editor of three books on the work of the cultural critic and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, Levin is also the co-editor of a volume of Walter Benjamin’s media theoretical writings and of CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (MIT Press 2002), the catalogue of a 2001 exhibition that he curated at the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe. Levin was also one of the co-curators of a series of 1989 exhibitions on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou, the ICA (London) and the ICA
(Boston). He is currently directing a long-term research project on the media archaeology of voice mail in the context of which he has assembled
the world’s first large-scale research collection of audio letters: The Princeton Phono-Post Archive.