“Carte Blanche” by Orakle Ngoy, Sarah Elena Muller & Matti Schulz [Bern]

“Cart Blanche” is a collaborative EP project by Congolese rapper and slam poet Yollande Orakle Ngoy together with Swiss musician Sarah Elena Müller and German artist/musician Matti Schulz. The artists plan to produce and give shape to a musical universe exploring various shared ideas and synergies.

The project emerges from ideas established during Orakle’s residency in Basel and previous collaborations with both artists. Orakle and Sarah first met in the context of the International Punch Agathe Project in Münster where they established points of common artistic and feminist activism interest. They explored these during tandem research trips in Kinshasa and Bern, and developed new musical collaborations under their stage name Orakle Ngoy feat. DJ Natur_E. Orakle met Matti during his residency at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, and subsequently developed a collaborative project exploring cross-cultural creation that “occupied” the Kunsthaus ACUD space in Berlin before being presented during the YAMBI City Festival in Kinshasa.

For the current project, the artists wish to extend and deepen the scope of their collaborations. Sarah and Matti will each produce beats and Orakle will write lyrics. The three artists will meet in Switzerland from 29 August to 17 October 2023 for a studio session and to mix and master the tracks.

BIOGRAPHIES

Orakle Ngoy is an artist and musician (slammer, rapper and performer) from
the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is a law graduate, activist and mother, and founder of the Afrika Diva collective, which advocates for the emergence of female talent in the DRC, and hosts the Yambi City festival. For many years, she has been speaking out against hate, sexism, inequality and violence. Her art is a hardcore appeal to the people of Kinshasa to respect “Mamans” and all women. Her music is like her, a mix of gaiety, ghetto and Kinshasa realities, mixing Congolese musical styles, folk and performance art. Since 2018, she is vice-president of the Arterial Network in Kinshasa. She has been involved in many projects inside and outside the borders of DRC, including artist residencies at Atelier Mondial in Basel (2022) and Cité des Arts de Paris (2021), and participation in the Kinzozi project in Kinshasa and Berlin by Laboratoire Kontempo (2021-22), Yambi, ACUD Macht Neu, Berlin and Kinshasa (2019), Spinning Triangles, S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin and Kinshasa (2019), and Punch Agathe, Pumpenhaus, Münster and Stuttgart (2019). Orakle has performed concerts in Tunis (Journées Musicales de Carthage, 2018), Brazzaville (Mbote Hip-Hop, 2018), and Dakar (Afropolitan, 2018). Since 2018, she has been running the Yambi City festival, produced with the members of Afrika Diva Collectif, which she founded in 2014. In all her activities, Orakle fights to network and promote the Congolese creative scene.

Sarah Elena Müller works since her graduation in Fine Arts at the
University of Arts in Bern in the fields of literature, music, virtual reality, radio play and theatre. She is interested in all forms of text and linguisticity, technological and social developments, and danceable music. Her first short text «Fucking God» was published by «Büro für Problem» in 2015. She performs in the spoken word duo «Cruise Ship Misery» as a ghostwriter and musician, and is a co-founder of the feminist writers’ collective RAUF. She writes regular columns in the Bernese daily newspaper «Der Bund» and leads the project «Meine Sprache und Ich» – an approach to Ilse Aichinger’s language criticism in virtual reality and text. She is currently working on the manuscript of her first novel.

Matti Schulz aka MC Garbage Juice is a visual artist and musician. In 2017 he was awarded the Goethe Institut residency “Urbanity” in Kinshasa (DRC) and developed an exhibition on location, played a concert and collaborated musically with Orakle Ngoy for the first time. From this collaboration resulted several songs and the music video “Kinshasa-Berlin” with Orakle and Lova Lova. In 2019, he received funding from the International Co-Production Fund of the Goethe Institute for “Yambi – Our House is your House”, together with Wilfried Beki Luzele and the AcudMachtNeu in Berlin. Here the artistic and musical collaboration continued in the form of exhibitions, concerts and new music pieces with Orakle and Lova Lova in Kinshasa and Berlin. Matti Schulz plays in various musical combinations. With his solo project MC Müllsaft he is just about to finish his first post-punk album. Together with his brother Kkoma, he has been making hip hop since his teenage days. Under different synonyms, he has played concerts in Berlin, Athens, Prague, Leipzig, Kinshasa and Halle. Matti studied fine arts in Dresden and Barcelona and completed his studies with a diploma (2012) and a master’s degree (2016). Matti works with a wide variety of media including sculpture, drawing, graphic design and installations. His works have been exhibited in Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Paris and Kinshasa. The artist and musician has lived in Berlin since 2016 and works in the Torstraße 111 art and project house.