1.11.2024, Friday 18:00 Uhr
School of Listening - Day 1
Venue:
- HFBK Hamburg, Extended Library
Welcome and introduction by Maayan Sheleff and Nora Sternfeld
Guava
Film screening by Thalia Hoffman
2014, 11 min
On a refugee road between Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and Beirut in 2048, the centennial year of the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, two people discuss love, memory, trust, and forgetfulness. The protagonists are in a state of dislocation, lost in time and memory, searching for a new place. One of them speaks in Hebrew and the other in Arabic. One tries to forget, the other to remember. This poetic prefiguration of a future political state echoes ghosts of the past and invites us to imagine different futures. Guava is the first of a film series made as part of the Guava Platform, which presents art actions that question the borders that space generates on bodies and the borders that bodies generate in space. The project calls for free movement and the removal of national borders east of the Mediterranean. It practices political imagination through film, video, performance, and participatory art.
Beat Midras/Yama
Performance and sound installation by Samira Saraya and Neta Weiner
Beat Midras, originally created by Stav Marin, Samira Saraya and Neta Weiner, is a word play on the Jewish concept of beit midrash, a discursive space for religious study; madāris/madrassa, the Arabic word for an educational institution; and the sonic, rhythmic, and musical connotations of the English word beat. The evening will highlight the power of creative language to build a community of resistance and its potential to bring about political change. It explores the role of art in facilitating adversarial dialogues, examining the boundaries between text, body, and voice while imagining a better tomorrow in Palestine-Israel and beyond.
The sound installation Yama is based on segments from a stage performance diving into the real and imagined past as well as possible futures of the 4500-year-old city of Jaffa. It reveals sociopolitical layers through multilingual stories based on biographical experiences of the artists and their relations with the city. Yama carves out a story that is part guided tour and part ritual prayer, calling for an intimate vocal moment between the artists and the listeners, allowing imagination to fill in the choreography of the bodies that are missing.
Saraya and Weiner are part of the multilingual and bi-national band System Ali, conceived in Jaffa as part of a struggle for housing rights. In their various collaborations they explore the relationship between language, vocal production, and movement to address language and performance as political tools via various performative methods, including spoken word, martial arts, contemporary dance, and beatboxing.
Yama stage performance credits: Writer and director: Neta Weiner | Creative partners and performers: Samira Saraya, Benjamin David Elder, Rony Ben Hamou, Neta Weiner | Choreographer and artistic consultant: Stav Marin | Dramaturgy: Raz Weiner | Writing consultant: Roy Hen.
Yama audio installation credits: Writer: Neta Weiner | Directors and performers: Stav Marin, Samira Saraya, Neta Weiner.