Watch the Sonic Acts’ video interview of Marshall Trammell and the ‘Insurgent Learning Workshop: Pedagogy of the Surveilled’, which he developed for Sonic Acts in 2024.

In case you haven’t met Marshall Trammell yet, here is your chance! Marshall is a music research strategist. He is also a stutterer. This embodied ‘rupture in language’, he says, reverberates through his body and continues to manifest in the music. When he plays the drums, the fluctuations in sound echo his personal experiences, which are both unique and emblematic of broader histories – particularly those of Black and Native communities.

His workshops can be seen as a form of political education through performance, and focus on working with personal histories of migrants as a way to resist surveillance. During ‘Insurgent Learning Workshop: Pedagogy of the Surveilled’ – organised by Sonic Acts and SALWA in Amsterdam – participants made music and ‘graphic scores’, visual prompts that would stimulate interaction with each other and the audience. During their concert at Singelkerk on 2 November 2024, the scores were held up by audience members, creating a collaborative music piece that explores the tensions between power, agency, and dehumanisation. Watch the concert and the creative process during the workshop in the video!

This video is published by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.