Eish (Life)!
Gather around ʿeish (عيش)', the Egyptian Arabic word for bread and for life itself.
Both sustenance and symbol, bread has fed generations and stood at the centre of moments when hunger became protest, from the Bread Riots of 1977 to ongoing struggles around food in contemporary Egypt.
'EISH (LIFE)! brings us together over an Egyptian cuisine-inspired dinner and a durational performance by Andrew Riad of Ahlan Club with Anthony Girgis and Ren Martin to consider bread as a vessel for collective memory, carrying our histories, families and those no longer at the table. Through the shared rhythms of eating, we reflect on life, loss and persistence, taking a mouthful of life together (luʾmat ʿeish, لقمة عيش).
Anthony Girgis is a musician and lighting designer. As founder of AGAVE Productions, working between Amsterdam and Dubai, he shapes the atmosphere for architecture, theatre and live experiences. Musically, he explores improvisation and tarab through the lens of third culture and its diversity, moving between Western and Arabic traditions, jazz and electronic.
Ren Martin is a self-taught drummer and guitarist whose work inhabits the space between composition and improvisation.
Jarring, fragmented, frenetic passages collide with sustained, mournful exhalations of electric guitar. Heavy grooves give way to the fluidity of rhythm; restraint gives way to raw, relentless tension. His practice is a pursuit of contemplative states, and of the dissolution of composition and self.
Andrew Riad (b. 2000, Cairo) is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and poet exploring the intersection of poetry, research, performance, and gesture. He works with archives, text, moving and still images, culinary happenings, and soundscapes to undo a monolithic history and propose a [re]imagined and silenced history revealing ostracized narratives as original sources of truth and fact. His projects imbue an emancipatory framework and understanding of language, of archive, and in that, gestures towards an opportunity for play and imagination to build towards what he calls a futurenarrative. For him, language is the experience of sound and ritual; of symbol and gesture and as such, is a site for resurrection, imagination, and [re]integration.