Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: Palestinian Sound Archive by Mo'min Swaitat
This session will bring forward the history of Palestinian music through deep listening and storytelling and will interlink radical historical and social movements of and through music. An archive of rare tapes and vinyl from Palestine and beyond, spanning field recordings of weddings to revolutionary tracks and synth-heavy 80s funk, as well as original acoustic and jazz albums, will be played and Mo'min will elucidate on how these recordings and/or albums have been made.
About the Seeing Through Flames series
The study sessions are informal discussion groups. Seeing Through Flames is a series of auditory assemblages that turn listening into a collective channel of exchange. These sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand, Emergency & Emergence, and survey different possibilities of forming solidarity through sound and music.
Seeing Through Flames convenes diverse practitioners, united by themes of adaptability and remediation via trans-mediatic storytelling, and the conscious renegotiation of our relationships to nature. The series investigates speculative timelines in order to provoke and think through ways of being in the world, against contemporary planetary capitalism.
By looking at politics of spiritual transformation and collective imagination, these study-as-listening sessions explore the potential for the poetic and vibrational undoing of the knowledge that underpins concepts of the dominant modes of being, as well as the oppression those modes create to make ourselves and our planet anew.
Over several years, Mo’min Swaitat has amassed an archive of rare tapes and vinyl from Palestine and beyond, spanning field recordings of weddings to revolutionary tracks and synth-heavy 80s funk. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Jenin in the north of the West Bank. The Majazz Project is a research project borne out of the archive, focused around sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage Palestinian and Arabic cassettes. It is a collaboration between Arab and non-Arab DJs, producers and artists interested in shedding new light on the richness and diversity of Arabic musical heritage. The aim behind Majazz Project is to safeguard the Palestinian sound archive and to make it more accessible in online and physical formats. It is also an outreach research project to connect Palestinian bands from the 60s, 70s and 80s with new audiences and to make their music available through streaming platforms both in their original form and reinterpreted and remixed by DJs, artists and musicians.
About the event
Free for all.
Limited Capacity.
Booking is required.
The duration of the event is one hour and a half. Seating is available.
Access
Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.
There are no audio descriptions for this event.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.
Safety during your visit
Due to COVID precautions, please do not attend this event if you/someone in your household is currently COVID-19 positive, has suspected symptoms, or is awaiting test results.
Staff and visitors are welcome to wear a face covering in all areas.
Event:
Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: Palestinian Sound Archive by Mo'min SwaitatDates:
4 Oct 2022, 6.30pm–8pmCurator:
Canan Batur
Supported by:
