Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Zifzafa

Performance
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
octoberoct 5 – 10

World premiere

45 minutes

In English, with French surtitles

Prices € 8 to € 15
Subscribers € 8 to € 12

CENTQUATRE-PARIS

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. 

See also

Espace Niemeyer
octoberoct 12 – 13

Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Air Pressure

Performance

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, artist, researcher and performer, revolutionizes the visual arts through the power of sound. As founder of Earshot, a non-profit organization that makes audio-based investigations for the defence of human rights and the environment, he kept a diary of Lebanon's anxiety-provoking airspace for a whole year. In a sound creation by Moe Choucair, he brings us a performance combining background noise and a climate of violence.

In the same place

CENTQUATRE-PARIS
octoberoct 5 - november – nov 5

LIMINAL, Forensic Oceanography, Border Forensics
From Sea to Sky

Visual arts
Free

Featuring different works by the LIMINAL, Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics collectives, the multimedia installation From Sea to Sky approaches intersectional immobility and frontier-based violence at sea. The objective is to highlight the way in which the Mediterranean maritime space has been transformed into a militarized border zone.
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
novembernov 5 – 8
Maison de la musique de Nanterre – Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national
novembernov 9
Théâtre Louis Aragon, Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art et création – danse – Tremblay-en-France
novembernov 30

Alessandro Sciarroni
U. (un canto)

Performance
Buy tickets

A year after the premier of IRIS at the Butte-aux-Cailles swimming pool, commissioned by the Festival d'Automne, in which he explored the Italian polyphonic repertoire, Alessandro Sciarroni brings us U. (un canto). This music-based performance piece evokes the profoundly mysterious relationship between human beings and nature.
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
decemberdec 4 – 8

Lina Majdalanie, Rabih Mroué
Quatre murs et un toit

Theatre Portrait
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In 1947, the trial of German playwright Bertolt Brecht took place in the United States in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), responsible for combating communist activism. It was here that Brecht wrote a declaration which he was forbidden to read out. The minutes of the trial, as well as this declaration, constitute one of the axes of this exuberant show.