Gilles Joseph André Aubry

Responsibilities

Gilles Aubry is a Swiss artist, musician and researcher. He holds an MA in Sound Art from the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) and a PhD in social anthropology from the Bern University. His work engages with sound, technology and environmental voices in relation to power and coloniality in various contexts. His installations, films, performances and radio plays have been presented in numerous international art exhibitions, film festivals, and music venues.
Recent projects include “The Gramophone Effect”, a sound piece with Robert Millis and the Indian collective “Traveling Archive”, commissioned by Documenta14 (2017, Kassel and Athens); “Black Anthenna”, a performance with Nathalie Mba Bikoro for the Tuned Cities Festival in 2018 (Ancient Messene); “Salam Godzilla”, a film essay shot in Agadir on the 1960 earthquake, premiered at the Marseille International Film festival (FID) in 2019, and presented later in the exhibiton “Love and Ethnology – The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity” at the Berlin House of World Cultures (HKW); and “Atlantic Ragagar”, an exhibition on seaweed and pollution presented at La Chambre de L’Art in Brussels (2021).

Aubry, Gilles, “Sawt, Bodies, Species: Sonic Pluralism in Morocco”, Adocs Press, Hamburg, 2023, print and Open Access pdf Version.
Aubry, Gilles and Panchia, Bhavisha, “Radio as Curriculum: Broadcasting Counter-hegemonic Knowledge in Radio Appartement 22 and The Pan African Space Station”, in Sarah Kianister, Nazan Maksudyan, Louis Petitjean and Julio Velasco (eds), Sound, Text, Context, HASP Verlag, Heildelberg, forthcoming in 2026.
Aubry, Gilles, “The Body of Sound: Ahmed Essyad’s Electroacoustic Music”, Norient.com, 2024.
Aubry, Gilles, “Stonesound: A Collaborative Experiment in Stone Sounding in Moulay Bouchta”, in Thomas Gartman and Michaela Schäuble (eds), “Studies in the Arts – Neue Perspektiven auf Forschung über, in und durch Kunst und Design”, Transcript Verlag, 2023 (free OA pdf).
Aubry, Gilles, “Performative (Un)sounding in the film Salam Godzilla”, in Julia Schröder and Volker Straebel (eds), “Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Reader”, Wolke Verlag, Hofheim, 2022.
Aubry, Gilles, “Salam Godzilla: Unsounding the 1960 Agadir earthquake”, in “Postcolonial repercussions: Auditory cultures between signification and the new ontology”, ed. by Schoon A. and Ismaiel-Wendt J., Transcript Verlag, 2022.
Aubry, Gilles, “Towards decolonized listening. A sound ethnography of the Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection“, proceedings of the Sonologia international conference on sound studies, São Paulo, 2017.