Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf

Max Sauer, Das Kochen (2020)

In everyday life, much is taken for granted, which viewed from a different perspective becomes an inscrutable object of study. The auditory ethnography “Das Kochen” (“Cooking”) achieves just such a shift in perspective, disclosing the acoustic dimension of a day in Dakar spent preparing the classic Senegalese dish thiéboudiène. Reduced to the audible, the close connection between material and social reality comes to the foreground. The binaural recording is accompanied by a written thesis, “Auditive Ethnography: Method between Objectivity and Distortion” which reflects on the participatory observation of an unfamiliar everyday life and helps build a bridge between artistic and scientific research fields.

The project was created under the supervision of Prof. Julian Rohrhuber and Marcus Schmickler as part of the Klang und Realität master’s program at the Institute for Music and Media at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf.