Eart_ض, a sound listening session with the collectives Qanat and Zaira Oram

At the heart of the shared interest lies a desire to explore the forms and potentials of sound and listening as learning methodologies, and both political and poetical practices to remember, inhabit and reimagine landscapes of belonging and communing habits emerging from the wisdoms of land and water. Moreover, in this research lies the desire to reconsider sound, orality and voice as tools for social and communal aggregation, in the logic of passing on knowledge and exploring collective-making/learning as an alternative human practice of development to those imposed by capitalism and patriarchy-oriented systems.

QANAT COLLECTIVE

Started in 2017 as part of the work developed by the cultural space LE 18 in Marrakech, QANAT is a long-term collaborative exploration of the politics and poetics of water in Marrakech and beyond, a collective effort to reflect and act upon the multiple contextual understandings and forms of (re)production of the commons. As a curated network of people and as a methodologically diverse platform, QANAT envisions to create spaces for sharing practices, thinking projects and designing together paths in order, on the one hand, to reactivate the memory of the collective heritage embodied by water civilizations in Marrakech as an entry to engage the city in new, participative and transformative ways. In this direction, since 2019, QANAT has been working in close dialogue with the cultural space Dar Bellarj and its community of women and children from the medina. On the other hand, QANAT aims at knitting together local (often fragmented) struggles to resonating reflections and actions in other contexts, in order to nourish local debates while contributing to the investigation on the possibility for artistic and curatorial practices to be catalysts and carriers of new imaginaries. In this direction, over the last years, we have created collaborative research programmes with initiatives, first of all in Palestine, but also in the Netherlands, Wales, and Scotland.

ZAIRA ORAM COLLECTIVE

Born in Zurich in 2020, Zaira Oram is a curatorial collective focused on experimental displays and interdisciplinary projects. Her practice involves research on sound art, performance and visual art and the creation of networks between different disciplines and areas of studies. Her main research threads are migration, contemporary narrative and border experiences. Zaira Oram has an open identity: she travels and transforms herself along the way. The collective was initiated by Francesca Ceccherini and Eleonora Stassi, and expanded with the participation of Chloé Dall'Olio, Camille Regli, Elisa Bernardoni and Francesca Brusa. Over the past three years, Zaira Oram has been working on the Swiss territory building networks and relationships with multiple institutions, associations and professionals, also constructing projects in peripheral locations and in public space. At the same time, the collective has started building bridges with other countries, such as Luxembourg, Italy, Turkey and Morocco. Zaira Oram is founder of OTO SOUND MUSEUM, born as a strategy to overcome the cultural limitations due to the pandemic and as a space for spreading political voices and sound experimentation. Born digitally, it also travels across different places in the physical realm.