Interstitial Listenings I: Charles Uzor's Bodycam Exhibit 3, Part I

Swiss Nigerian composer Charles Uzor’s work Bodycam Exhibit 3: George Floyd in Memoriam provides an opening to begin theorizing Black lives and antiblackness in Switzerland. In the global Black Lives Matter protests, Floyd’s murder became linked, in Switzerland, to the case of Mike Ben Peter, who died after being pinned down by six police officers in Lausanne. Uzor’s Bodycam Exhibit 3 foregrounds the question of the listener in music and, as an extension, the observer of these brutalities against Black lives by creating an encounter with this scene in music. At the same time, the piece raises such questions also as of the archive: What can be found in the archive? What may be told of through our methods of registering? Creating such a piece of music in Switzerland thus requires us to think about the very inability to hear Black Switzerland.