Saturday 11 May 2024, 7.30pm
What is the role of citizens and local communities in preserving the sound of their region? Who decided what music and sounds are ‘worth’ being archived? And how should we engage with archives as sites of both remembering and forgetting?
As part of the ERC’s Beyond 1932 Research Project at King’s College London, sound artist and composer Hardi Kurda will launch his new project, Archive Khanah. The event is part of Space21 Festival based across Slemani (Kurdistan) and its artist networks in Lebanon, Cyprus and the UK. The evening will introduce the sound archive’s interactive and community-based approach to recording and archiving forgotten and excluded voices from the 1920s - 1970s in Kurdistan and Iraq by using computer game technology to capture and perform the sounds of the region.
Supported by AFAC (Arab Fund for culture and art) and British Council Northern Ireland
Programme:
- 7.30-8.30pm: Exhibition of Archival Materials from Slemani, Kurdistan
- 8.45-9.45pm: Sonic Archiving in Kurdistan (Film ’15 + Introduction to Video Game Technology)
- 10:00-10:30pm: Live Performance of Archive and Video Game
The residency series is organised by Rim Irscheid, curator and cultural anthropologist at King’s College London. The Beyond 1932 project is funded by the EPSRC via the UKRI/EC HE Guarantee ERC scheme (funder Award Reference: EP/X022749/1).
Dr. Hardi Kurda is a sound artist, improviser, and researcher with a PhD in Music from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the founder of SPACE21, a platform for sound art and experimental music in Slemani, and Archive Khanah, an interactive sound archive project inspired by the philosophy of computer gaming, featuring coloured cassettes and recorded sounds from Kurdistan and Iraq.
Hardi's work explores radio noise and sonic traces often considered illegal, abandoned, unheard, invisible, broken, distorted, or forgotten — sounds without a place or destination. He developed the concept of “The Found Score”, which is an Urgent Listening method that navigates attention toward non-auditory senses. His listening’s approach rooted in his personal experience of migration and crisis during an illegal journey to Europe.
