Instruments and the Embodiment of Globality

Building Sound: Luthiers, Materials, and Critical Perspectives
Activity
18 September 2026, from 18h to 18:55h | Lecture | Lecture room

Programme activity Building Sound: Luthiers, Materials, and Critical Perspectives
Open and free activity with limited capacity
Language: English

David Irving

Musical instruments are tools that allow us to construct sound, but they are also objects loaded with material and symbolic histories that can guide us in a critical analysis of the music we make today. Using examples from the modern period to the present, David R. M. Irving explores how materials (tropical woods, ivory, metals, animal products) reveal global networks marked by colonialism and extractivism. The lecture proposes that we rethink the instrument as a testimony to globalisation and as a critical space from which to interrogate the ecological and cultural present.

Activity promoted by Difraccions
With the participation of David Irving

The Assault of Illusion

An exhibition about art, illusion, deception and power. Featuring around twenty local and international artists, it offers a critical journey through various artistic techniques that have shaped our desires and our sense of reality. In the era of deepfakes and artificial intelligence, can art help us unveil these mechanisms of manipulation?

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