Feb 18 2026

Sounds of Black Switzerland: Performance-Lecture by Jessie Cox

WED | 7PM

On the occasion of Tiran Willemse’s moving image and sound-focused exhibition, Dweller, please join us for a performance-lecture by musician and scholar, Jessie Cox. Cox will present on his recently published book Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices, pairing his discursive interventions with a musical performance. Attending to the historical inaudibility of Black Swiss voices, Cox looks to the ways music and sound refigure how we listen to and relate with the world.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and a scholar of experimental music as well as a composer and drummer. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP, 2025) addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. A dedicated collaborator, Cox has worked as a composer and drummer with ensembles such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, LA Phil, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Image: Photograph by Hiromi Gut