Brigitte Schiffer: Sounds of Exile

How do new perspectives on the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art emerge? What questions, challenges, and insights accompany the multifaceted research related tocultural belongings andartistic works? What personal stories lie behind the scholarly approaches, and what new horizons and social issues do contemporary, artistic perspectives on museum research open up?

The“Gästezimmer”event series amplifies the voices of international fellows and partners from the CoMuse – The Collaborative Museum project and provides an open space for exchange between museum teams, research partners, and the public. In regular discussions, scholars, curators, educators, artists, and collaboration partners provide insights into current projects and the multifaceted work behind the scenes. Through dialogue, they present interim and research findings and discuss with visitors the directions collaborative research can take.

In doing so,“Gästezimmer”highlights the importance of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and outreach: Working in teams, participants explore new contexts, critically examine colonial history and contexts of injustice, reflect on collection practices and approaches, and collaboratively develop museum practices in a participatory manner. It is particularly important to give voice to the perspectives and demands of the communities connected to thesecultural belongings.

Whether through archival discoveries, provenance research, artistic interventions, or digital methods—each“Gästezimmer” offersnew insights and perspectives on what research entails today.

The event series is open to anyone interested and invites active participation.“Gästezimmer”is a forum where questions are welcome and perspectives are free to evolve. Be our guest!

“Gästezimmer”is a collaboration withCoMuse – The Collaborative Museum, an initiative of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art.

A conversation between artist Netta Weiser and musicologist Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny about the life and work of the Jewish-German composer Brigitte Schiffer (1909–1986). Together, they discuss Schiffer’s years in exile in Egypt, queer traces in the archives, and practices of listening across time and cultures.

Brigitte Schiffer studied composition and musicology in Berlin in the early 1930s. As part of her doctoral research, she conducted fieldwork in the Siwa Oasis, a remote oasis in western Egypt. Using a phonograph, she documented a variety of vocal practices of the Amazigh community living there. Her recordings include rare sound documents, among them a funeral song performed by a children’s choir and a collection of love songs with queer undertones sung by farmworkers in the oasis’s gardens.

After completing her dissertation, Schiffer fled Germany in 1935 following the Nazis’ rise to power and went into exile in Egypt, where she lived for the next 30 years and became one of the central figures in the musical life of cosmopolitan Cairo.

Schiffer’s recordings from Siwa have been preserved in the Phonogram Archive—an institution that was historically involved in colonial knowledge production and is now part of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The artist Netta Weiser brings Schiffer’s archive to life in her sound exhibition*fuga*, which is currently on view in the listening room of the Humboldt Forum.

As part of the “Gästezimmer” series, Netta Weiser speaks with musicologist Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny, who has been researching Brigitte Schiffer’s life and work for over ten years. In a dialogue between artistic and scholarly research, they reflect on colonial sound archives, the challenges of transcultural research, and the political potential of a different way of listening.

PARTICIPANTS

Netta Weiser

Netta Weiser(b. 1991) is a Berlin-based artist and choreographer who works in the fields of performance, sound installation, and experimental radio. In 2019, she initiated the long-term artistic research project*Radio-Choreography*, which explores the transformation of dance into sound, the relationship between live broadcasts and repressed stories, and collective listening as a choreographic practice.
Her works have been presented internationally, most recently at Tanzquartier Wien, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Onassis Stegi in Athens, WDR, the Villa Medici in Rome, and the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, among others. She has received fellowships at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Berlin Academy of Arts and at the VALIE EXPORT Center in Linz. In addition to her artistic practice, she hosts a monthly radio show onreboot.fm.

Matthias Pasdzierny

Prof. Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny (born 1976 in Göttingen) is a musicologist based in Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts/Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). His areas of research include: the critical-scholarly edition of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s (tape) music; music and migration after 1945; and the history and historiography of techno/electronic dance music. Publications include:*Wiederaufnahme? Return from Exile and West German Musical Life after 1945, text + kritik, Munich 2014;Inside the Studio. Spaces of Electronic Music Production Berlin/Cairo, Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2025

- Price: free

- Duration: 60 min

- Age: 12 and up

- Location: Mechanische Arena in the foyer

- Part of:Gästezimmer