Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Zifzafa
octoberoct 5 – 10
Saturday october 5
16h
Sunday october 6
19h
Monday october 7
16h
Tuesday october 8
19h
Wednesday october 9
19h
Thursday october 10
19h
Thursday october 10
21h
Concept, writing and performance Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Music composed by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh and performed by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh & saxophonist Amr Mdah.
Alserkal Arts Foundation, L'Art Rue / Dream City 2025, the CENTQUATRE-PARIS and the Festival d'Automne à Paris are co-producers of this performance. The CENTQUATRE-PARIS and the Festival d'Automne à Paris are co-presenting it.
With the support of
Zifzafa, is an arabic word to describe a wind that shakes and rattles all in its path. Here, it becomes the title of a performance of artist and researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan, that enmeshes sonic composition, video game engines and spoken word, to immerse us in the heart of a movement to resist green colonialism in the occupied Syrian Golan heights.
Over the next years, wind will become an increasingly important point of focus both as a source of energy in the place of fossil fuels and as a destructive byproduct of a warming earth. As such we are already starting to see wind becoming an agent in the reorganization of social and political networks and territorial imagination. Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores how forms of social organization around wind, that have lasted for at least 50 000 years, are now transforming. Zifzafa takes us into the occupied Golan Heights, in a particular microclimate, where the ensuing environmental damage and social displacement caused by the noise of 30 of the largest land-based wind turbines, looms heavy. Composed by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh and performed by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh and saxophonist Amr Mdah, this live audio essay uses sound as both the unwanted byproduct of wind extraction and also a tool to rethink and resist the incoming winds of dispossession.
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