Talk and Listening Session

This event is co-hosted with Fylkingen!

16:00 - 17:30 -  Talk: Repetition, Restoration, Refusal

17:30 - 19:00 - Iftar is Served, discussion, Food, and Hangout

19:00 - 20:00 - Listening Session: A Ubiquitous Wetness

Talk: Repetition, Restoration, Refusal by Syma Tariq 

Silence, like sound, has a disruptive relationship with modernity. The complex relationship between silence and modernity is clear in contemporary event-memory, which attempts to name, fix, and close people in time and space after systemic violence. Since the late 20th century, aural archives, truth commissions, sonic-memorials and a testimony-centred heritage industry have worked both with silence and sound in public attempts at historical redress. This turn towards restoration then tests the capacities of speech and listening ‘after’ violence. Dealing with silence and sound through such globalised memory cultures raises questions about restorative justice, and the hierarchies of listening that come with such attempts. Weaving together archival sound, postcolonial feminist theory and oral historical research, this talk explores the dynamics and potential of repetition, restoration and refusal based on my research on the 1947 Partition of British India, and reflections on the German Holocaust and South African apartheid. Embracing Katherine McKittrick’s approach to the ‘remix and mashup’ via DJ Spooky, these ideas intend to open up new avenues into the politics of speech, sound and silence, but without guarantee.

Listening Session: A Ubiquitous Wetness 

In many mystical Islamic traditions, especially aniconic ones, the sonic is privileged over the seen. Voice is privileged over vision. Sound is immaterial, ethereal, dynamic. Sound moves like spirit. The divine cannot be seen, but is known through the word. God may not be represented visually, but is invoked in sound. In ‘The Invention of Rivers’, Dilip da Cunha reframes rivers as not bounded and discrete bodies but as ‘a ubiquitous wetness’: ambient, seen and unseen. This listening session is a sonic journey through sacred and profane infrastructures across different aquatic landscapes, to witness how the hidden and the manifest sound together in struggle. The field recordings emerge from research in spaces along coastal and riverine Pakistan plagued by environmental violence and militarised conflict, reeling from floods, heatwaves and dispossession. Here, sound becomes the medium through which an ancient inheritance of grief is interlaced with the crises of this particular historical moment - climate grief, language grief, grief against erasure.

*Note this event will take place in English

Syma Tariq

Syma Tariq is a researcher and sound practitioner based in London, UK. Drawing on feminist sound and listening practices, colonial a/temporality and audio experiments, she is interested in what listening does, and what it can do, when it meets extractive and differentiating knowledge systems. Her doctoral project Partitioned Listening, undertaken at the Centre for Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, UAL, focused on the forms and processes of aural-archival knowledge relating to the 1947 partition of British India. Her wider practice has evolved through radio production, sound curation and recording, field recording and DJing.

Zahra Malkani

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across multiple media - including text, video and sound - she explores the politics of development, displacement and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in the city.