Palestinian Sound Archive returns to Cafe OTO for a programme looking at Palestinian Bedouin life, culture and celebration through film, live performance, archival sound and storytelling.

Across Bedouin communities, music, poetry and oral history have long been central ways of carrying identity, memory and place. Sound is not separate from daily life: the grinding of coffee, animals moving out to pasture, voices travelling between tents, songs recited on camelback, wedding music stretching across days. Much of this archive has been sonic rather than material - held in the body, passed from one generation to another, kept alive through performance, repetition, movement and gathering.

The evening includes a live performance by Palestinian Bedouin artist, Lobna Sana, from the Naqab region. Sana’s multidisciplinary practice works across architecture, film, sculpture, mapping, curation and activism, addressing the social and spatial conditions of Bedouin life under occupation and the ongoing struggle over land, memory and recognition. Her work asks how architecture, image, sound and collective practice can document what is being erased, while also imagining forms of repair, return and continuity.

There will also be a live analogue DJ set from Palestinian Bedouin artist Mo’min Swaitat and Dan Nicholls, drawing from the Palestinian Sound Archive’s collection of cassettes, field recordings and popular music histories from Palestine and beyond.

We’ll be screening Susya, a beautiful black-and-white documentary by Max Sänger, followed by a Q&A. The film looks at Palestinian Bedouin life in the Occupied West Bank village of Susya, where territorial disputes with Israeli soldiers and settlers shape daily life. Every walk with the sheep becomes a negotiation over remaining pasture. Resistance appears through perseverance, storytelling, memory and the act of continuing to live on the land.

This event explores archival practice as a decolonial methodology and an act of resistance: sharing sounds, images and stories that document Palestinian heritage, culture, celebration, dance and survival, while keeping those histories active in the present.

Artwork by Mustafa al-Hallaj.