Wednesday 20 August 2025, 7.30pm
The Regular Working Group is a musical programme that turns artistic failures on their heads. It was formed as a response to the glaring failures of art in the face of the genocide in Palestine. The programmes always bring to the forefront Aggressive Listening styles: a listening where we listen with compassion, horizontally and with the direct intention of anonymising ourselves to counter surveillance and power-laden listening structures. In this iteration, we invite artists and researcher Dr. Alia Mosallam visiting from Berlin, Akil Scafe-Smith from Resolve Collective, and Ikhras, a punk band with a Palestinian error code on its forehead.
IKHRAS is a hardcore punk band from London / Brighton with raging sonics exercising through the various styles the genre has to offer. The band's latest offering, "Anwa3 Al-Mowt", tackles subjects of loss, generational trauma, treachery, betrayal and revenge.
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and family histories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She is currently working on historicizing the construction of the Aswan High Dam through songs and stories of the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it; through a manuscript and various visual and sonic installations. Some of her research-based articles, essays and short-stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, exploring overlooked struggles in various regions in Egypt. At the moment she is teaching Middle East history through music at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin and tracing the trail of North African soldiers and workers across the fronts of World War I. She strives to reveal their solidarity movements on the warfronts in Europe and bring them , through history workshops, back home.
Akil Scafe-Smith is a director of RESOLVE Collective, an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology, and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across the world, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment. RESOLVE are currently the commissioned artists as part of a forthcoming group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, resident artists at Camberwell Space, part of University Arts London, and have recently completed exhibitions at Tate Liverpool and the Design Museum and have co-created community spaces with young people in Nelson with In-Situ in Pendle, and residents in Angell Town in Brixton.
1000 Pounds To Survive Us is a verb with motion embedded in its every decision. Together they intention a beast with many arms into dancing despite language as one medium amongst many. They lay rest to expectations of music, poetry and enunciation as they play wires, invented instruments and romance technologies into being. Their origin story began in support of the Gaza Sunbirds, but the chemistry was too hard to ignore, and they have since played together with and without purpose. They invite you to feel deeply the meaning of call and response, of music as a technology for presence, and they give you simple tools to feel you can decide with them, what time is, and what it can be.
