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“We are constantly acting as conduits for the sounds we know. Can becoming aware of this echoing make us also aware that we should exert agency over what we are echoing and why?” - Bint Mbareh
The second event in the Festival of Language Series, we welcome Bint Mbareh and Tasneim Zyada, two performance artists who delve into the relationship between language and land/bodyscapes. Zyada, with her spoken and embodied poetry, and Bint Mbareh with her sound work together encourage the audience to immerse themselves in the sensory manifestations of language.
We navigate the complexities of language by inviting everyone to explore its potential and limitations - exploring the audience's understanding of complicity by breaking open their expectations of spectatorship and witnessing. From the ephemeral nuances of interpersonal communication to the impact on collective dynamics, we examine how language operates across multiple scales, resonating through/against time and space.
SPEAKERS
BINT MBAREH works with all formats of sound (radio, live, installation and many others) and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing human and more than human. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. The songs that she learned helped communities summon rain, and at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is, communally determine how to share resources, mainly the resource of time, fairly. Bint Mbareh makes music and sound today because she believes these uses can still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary communal upheavals, still looking for these significations in Palestinian landscape, now in the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses. She has been a practicing artist since 2018.
TASNEIM ZYADA is a calm storm on the spoken word scene. She is a published Palestinian writer and multidisciplinary creative based in London. Tasneim explores the generational stories that rise within her own, delivering a body of work that documents the hard hitting layers within her identity and life experiences. Having started out in 2015 as a regular performer at London open mics, Tasneim's words have since taken her internationally. She has been featured in several festivals - notably: Shubbak, Waltham Forest Mela, AWAN, Bloomsbury Festival, Bethlehem Cultural Festival in Scotland and recently headlining at the first festival for showcasing Palestinian artists in London, PalArt Festival. Tasneim's other accolades include facilitating sold out poetry workshops on memory and repressed emotions and voice over work - voicing a character in George the Poet's multi-award winning podcast. Currently, Tasneim is writing her debut poetry collection to be published in 2024/25. @tasneimzyada
With Pebbles Under my Tongue is a series of events and displays looking at creative responses to contemporary conflicts in our landscapes, organised by Jumanah Bawazir, Inigo Minns and Aoi Phillips.
With increasing pressures placed on the planet through resource extraction and territorial tensions our occupation of the land is under immense scrutiny. And with this we are seeing an increase in creative responses to landscape and the natural world. Our voices and the words we choose to use are soaked with political and poetic power and can help us define and understand the spaces we occupy. The series looks at how practitioners from different fields use media to explore these conditions and what languages and forms of voice they adopt. It is seen as a celebration: of the forms of expression that we find to understand our environment and to coerce and resist the powers that exist around us.
Over three weeks a number of different practitioners have been invited to share their work through the reading of poems, live performance, screenings and audio installations.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00