In urdu the word for sound, call or cry is sada. From an Arabic word that means echo.
All sound is only echo.
When taken from the Sanskrit root, sada also means eternal. The echo is how sound moves
across eternity. Binding bodies across time.
The echo is how sound becomes collective.
Sada, Sada.
All sound is only echo.
When taken from the Sanskrit root, sada also means eternal. The echo is how sound moves
across eternity. Binding bodies across time.
The echo is how sound becomes collective.
Sada, Sada.
These recordings were made in the wake of the 2022 floods in Sindh, Pakistan that devastated these landscapes. The urdu word for flood, Sailaab, comes from the the Persian word ‘Aab’, meaning water. The sail is speculated to borrow from an Arabic word which means to wander. Water wanders. The impulse, the desire to wander is fundamental to the fitrat, the heart, of water. And to wander is a fundamental practice in the mystic’s pedagogy.
May I seek and ever seek
And may I never meet
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
With these sounds I share with you some mysterious moments of connection and collectivity. In moments where it felt like sound collapsed space and time. Sonic amulets from teachers and guides, some who I sought and others who found me, by the river, the lake and the sea. sacred, enchanted ecologies haunted by militarism and endangered by extractivist infrastructural development. These invocations are the soundings of a different kind of infrastructure: forms hidden and manifest that shape and maintain our spiritual, interrealm and interspecies solidarities. This is how the living make the dead partners in struggle, how the living make the dead partners in struggle.
Humkalam.
We will listen to a series of recordings, collective sonic invocations by women. Each invokes the story and the spirit of a wandering woman, a woman seeking. An echo practice.
May I seek and ever seek
And may I never meet
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
With these sounds I share with you some mysterious moments of connection and collectivity. In moments where it felt like sound collapsed space and time. Sonic amulets from teachers and guides, some who I sought and others who found me, by the river, the lake and the sea. sacred, enchanted ecologies haunted by militarism and endangered by extractivist infrastructural development. These invocations are the soundings of a different kind of infrastructure: forms hidden and manifest that shape and maintain our spiritual, interrealm and interspecies solidarities. This is how the living make the dead partners in struggle, how the living make the dead partners in struggle.
Humkalam.
We will listen to a series of recordings, collective sonic invocations by women. Each invokes the story and the spirit of a wandering woman, a woman seeking. An echo practice.
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Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist. Collaboration, research and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across multiple media —including text, video and sound— she explores the politics of development, displacement and dispossession in Pakistan through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, a lamakan site for study, solidarity and seeking. She was born and raised in/by Karachi.
Sindh is named after Sindhu, the ancient river that flows, expands, contracts across its surface. It is a profoundly sacred and deeply revered river. The Rig Vedas were written at the banks of this river, and they mention Sindhu over 150 times: ‘Waters, the worshipper addresses to you excellent praise… the rivers flow by sevens through the three worlds; but the Sindhu surpasses all the other streams in strength.’ This river predates the Himalayas. Through the massive geological shifts that birthed the highest mountains on the planet, the Sindhu endured and softly shored a path.River worship is an ancient and ongoing tradition here. Devotees are known as Daryapanthi: those who walk the path of the river. Another name for Sindhu, and for Sindh, is Mehran. A name connected etymologically to Mehr/Mitra - the Indo-Persian diety of water and friendship.
Mitr. Friend.
Mitr. Friend.