Sounds of Eurasia – Constructing a network through Beuys/voice mail

For Beuys EURASIA was an imaginary place, a fertile thought space, where the divide between east and west, between intuition and rationality and countless other formative binaries could be overcome.

For DJ Sniff, a Tokyo-based musician from LA, contemporary Eurasia is also a place at once real and imaginary. Invited by the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo to participate in the cross-disciplinary art project “Beuys on/off”, he took a close critical look at Beuys‘ utopian concept of EURASIA. Since the pandemic coincided with this invitation, he has been working from his home in Tokyo instead of travelling across the region. He’s been working with only voices, music, sounds and other material traces to capture a sense of who Beuys was, how his work is transformed over time and above all: what Eurasia is, what it might be, what it could be or become.

In the fourth episode of “Die Erde spricht / the Earth is speaking” DJ Sniff explores the sounds and ideas of Beuys as they survive on records in relation to his own music and the soundscapes of his everyday life. He takes records as objects and vehicles. As a point of departure for thinking about the music business and the business of making music. And for reflecting on both of these as social practices that bring people together across the world – even, or perhaps especially, during a pandemic.

For all information on the anniversary programme „beuys 2021. 100 years of joseph beuys“ visit: https://beuys2021.de/