On Reverb and Return

MADEYOULOOK was invited to give a keynote lecture to open the “Fleeting Voices” conference at the University of Vienna, held from 1 to 3 October 2025.

It explores voice as both echo and origin—how sound reverberates through time while enabling return to invisibilised knowledges and futures yet imagined. Drawing from MADEYOULOOK’s artistic practice with South African oral histories —as sound, story, and song— it examines voice's capacity to create new worlds through the radical potential of multi-vocality against singular meta-narratives.

The Keynote was a lecture performance given to a blindfolded audience, including sound excerpts played in 5-part surround-sound from MADEYOULOOK works, archives and related sources. The text below presents a part of what was shared.

full text here.