25–26 July 2025
How do we listen to archives in times of crisis? How do fragile histories, lost songs and displaced voices resonate in the present?
Across two days, artists, archivists and musicians come together for workshops, performances and discussions, transforming archival materials into living, breathing works. Through urgent listening, we reimagine histories and collective memory with cassette recordings, experimental sound and interactive performances.
On day one, we explore archival interventions and community listening practices in Kurdistan, Western Armenia and Palestine. Collectively listening to cassette recordings of Archive Khanah, which this year is dedicated to all three archives, we engage in urgent listening and practice feeling listening – gathering displaced voices, and lost songs, listening deeply to what they carry.
Through shared archives, these fragments are transformed into living works, where absence and loss spark new expressions. Performances by the artists become an archive of time — their stories shared in soundscapes. Through collective improvisation, artists showcase works that respond to the concept of urgent listening.
On day two, the focus shifts towards experimental and electronic music, breathing life into the archives through the lens of collective care and resilience in archival practices from Kurdistan, Palestine and Western Armenia.
During a panel discussion audiences are able to engage with performers and share personal and collective histories that become a force of connection, resistance and renewal of archival practice.
The day culminates in an evolving live interactive performance of sharing our experiences in the archival space using participants' heart pulses, turning the archive into a space where stories of struggle and survival echo with hope and are shared between archivists and their bodies.
Artists: Olivia Melkonian, Rim Irscheid, Hazem Jamjoum, Hardi Kurda, Gregory Dargent, and Werner Hasler
SPACE21 Festival has been held annually in Slemani, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, since 2017. Over the years it has fostered international collaborations and artist exchanges with festivals such as Irtijal in Beirut, Breach in Cyprus and Sonorities in Belfast. Archive Khanah is part of SPACE21 projects: www.space21.org, www.khanah.org
Augmented Reality Orchestra supported by Pro Helvetia, Fondation Suisa, Burgergemeinde Bern, Swisslos – Culture Canton de Berne
Rim Irscheid is an ethnomusicologist, curator and textile artist working with hand embroidery, field recordings and found materials. Combining ethnographic research, curatorial practice and arts-based methods, her work looks at artist-led institution building, emotional aspects of creative labour and interpretations of care in curatorial activism. Some of her research-based articles and essays can be found in Sonic Matter, field notes Berlin and Norient. Her mixed media installations address sensory aspects of memory making and ambivalent feelings towards ‘home’ and have been exhibited at Cafe OTO, Modern Art Oxford and London Design Festival.
Hazem Jamjoum is curator of the British Library’s early twentieth century audio recordings of relevance to Arab and Gulf History. His work aims at digitizing, cataloguing and contextualizing this part of Arab communities’ audio heritage. He has also co-lead a project aimed at identifying similar at-risk audiovisual collections in the region with the longer term aim of fostering such preservation and curatorial work on a wider scale. His doctoral research in history at NYU traces the connections between the production of “Arabic music” as a concept and a commodity, and the implications of these production processes on supra-state collective identifications, pan-Arabism in particular.
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.
Werner Hasler is an electronic musician and trumpet player working on hybrids of exhibition/installation and concerts, emphasising spatialisation and live sampling. He teaches Music and Electronics at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB Jazz). https://www.wernerhasler.com/
Olivia Melkonian is a producer, DJ and sonic archivist invested in projects of cultural preservation. She archives dialect, ritual and collective memory with a focus on family and the home. In her work, Olivia interrogates the endangered Western Armenian experience, which remains under threat of erasure. Through her practice, she presents memory as a tool of resistance and recording as an act of revolution. https://forma.org.uk/artists/olivia-melkonian
Grégory Dargent is an Electric guitarist and oud player, composer, director, and photographer, he cultivates his musical and identity schizophrenia through improvised music, Tuareg trance, jazz, Turkish maqam, minimalist music, pop, African American worksongs or the French song. From the Hijâz'Car to Babx, from the Berber singer Houria Aïchi to Camelia Jordana, from the Electrik GEM to Rachid Taha, from the trio H to the mad Sirventés by Manu Théron, from contemporary music to contemporary choreography, from the acoustic ouds to the most nuclear guitars, he directs, accompanies, composes, puzzles out, questions, digs, mistakes, bounces, arranges, orchestrates and tirelessly shares his musical and photographic passions. https://www.gregory-dargent.com/copie-de-soleil-d-hiver
