Temple | Decolonising Sound Workshop with meLê yamomo

meLê yamomo

meLê yamomo composes with time itself—stretching, layering, and bending it into new sonic landscapes. His work is not simply about sound, but about the ghosts that inhabit it, the histories it carries, and the futures it dares to imagine. Born in the currents of migration, his life has unfolded across Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, Munich, and now between Amsterdam and Berlin where he moves fluidly between composing, academic scholarship, and theatre-making, dissolving the boundaries between research and artistic practice. Awarded the prestigious Open Ear Award and the KNAW Early Career Award, yamomo’s work is a study in sonic entanglements—a decolonial choreography of echoes and silences. In Echoing Europe, historical recordings shift from museum objects into haunting performances, reminding us that sound is never neutral—it is a witness, a weapon, a memory. 

meLê is Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy. He is the project leader and principal investigator of the Restituting, Reconnecting, and Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound) project, the EU-JPICH project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS), and the NWO Veni project »Sonic Entanglements«. Through his artistic and sonic labor in music-theatre, radio, podcasts, and performance, and as curator, yamomo invites us into a world where listening is resistance, where sound becomes a map to hidden pasts and possible futures. “Sometimes,” he says, “you only have to listen.”