WHEN THE LAND SPEAKS – صوت الأرض

Tickets: https://www.shubbak.co.uk/when-the-land-speaks/

When the Land Speaks – صوت الأرض invites you to join a guided excursion through Hackney Marshes, exploring what it means to be truly connected with the land we live on.

Fragmented by colonial forces throughout history and neglected by our own leaders, diaspora hailing from the Arabic-speaking world have a varied relationship to land. When we are divorced from our homelands and immersed in a lifestyle that often revolves around work and isolation, this event asks – how can we honour our homes by connecting with the land and the nature that grows here?

The trail will be guided by sound artist and researcher, Bint Mbareh; visual artist and landscape architect, Juliette Mourad; and poet and electrical engineer, Ola Elhassan. Through story-telling,  foraging and mudlarking, we will reconnect with plants and fungi, pick up objects to use as instruments, exchange stories, create earth pigments, and engage in deep, atmospheric listening. We’ll then gather at The Hall and build a collective soundscape, stitching together phrases from our stories, and create zines.

This event follows When the Night Speaks – صوت اللّيل on July 7th, a party at The Yard interweaving stories and poems into the sonic landscape of the night.

Bint Mbareh works with all format 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. She has been a practicing artist since 2018.

Juliette Mourad is an artist working on the relations between and amongst humans, non-humans, and land. They do so through writing, collage, and the domestic arts. Herbalism, foraging, earth pigments... are all tools in creating and reclaiming the means of art production, creation, and land access. After lengthy space and territory studies, Juliette turned to the plant world, a turn which allowed knowledge reclamation and community building in their migration from Lebanon to Europe. Juliette is devoted to exploring our dis/connections to territory and community amidst migrations, political turmoil, and global capitalism, but goes through those with a joyful praxis, facilitating workshops and nature walks where people can have a good time and realise they know more than they thought they did.

Ola Elhassan is a Sudanese poet and electrical engineer in London. Sometimes her poetry experiments with and about music, mathematics, physics, and dancing. She is a resident poet and member of the Common Sound collective, often hosting their improvised live music jams across festivals and homely venues alike.

Curated and produced by Riwa Saab, Young Shubbak alumna.

Generously supported by Arts Council England and the A. M. Qattan Foundation.