Zifzafa by Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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Alserkal Arts Foundation announces the international premiere of Zifzafa, a live audio essay by Lawrence Abu Hamdan with Busher Kanj Abu Saleh, Amr Mdah and Earshot.

Zifzafa, in Arabic, is a word used to describe a wind that shakes and rattles all in its path.

In this live performance, the word becomes a conceptual tool to map a network of social relations transformed through and by wind-sound. In tracing Zifzafa, we can feel the connections between people, pollen, dust and animals across vast open spaces. Yet Zifzafa’s engulfing noise can also act as a border—one that restricts, confines, isolates and divides.

Wind is an increasingly important agent, both as a renewable source replacing fossil fuels and as a destructive by-product of a warming Earth. As such, we are starting to see wind as a participant in the reorganisation of social and political networks and the reshaping of territorial imagination.

This live performance centres around a digital simulation developed by Earshot, the audio research NGO led by Abu Hamdan, serving as a sonic document and archive of the devastating effect that the planned incursion of thirty-one wind turbines will have on the Syrian Jawlani community residing in the occupied Golan Heights.

During this performance, the simulation will be used as a musical instrument, a tool that acoustically guides the audience through this landscape, unfolding a story of dispossession and resistance. The sounds from this simulation will be accompanied with live music performed by the saxophonist Amr Mdah and scored by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh, both renowned for their work in Jawlani band ‘Hawa Dafi’ or Warm Air.

All the sonic turbulence generated in this performance will underscore a text delivered by Abu Hamdan, examining how a tool designed to produce clean energy can become a machine that establishes new borders––blades that carve through economic, spatial, ethnic, social and acoustic communion. From this specific microclimate, the work expands the claim to self determination to include sonic autonomy, showing the vital role sound can play in the struggle for liberation in the face of erasure.

The Zifzafa performance is presented by the Alserkal Arts Foundation and co-produced by Festival d’Automne à Paris, CENTQUATRE-PARIS and L'Art Rue as part of Dream City 2025.

The performance will take place from 5 – 6pm and again at 7 - 8 pm on Saturday, 21 September, at the Alserkal Arts Foundation Project Space, Warehouse 50, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai.


About The Project

In 2023 political unrest erupted throughout the occupied Syrian Golan Heights on a scale unseen for more than forty years. The impetus for this protest movement was the looming construction of thirty-one large-scale wind turbines on the last remaining open space available to the resident Jawlani Syrian community already subject to Israeli occupation since 1967. European regulations stipulate that turbines of this size be at least two kilometres from the nearest residences. This project has planned turbines to be erected as close as thirty-five metres to homes, causing an unbearable amount of noise that will effectively force people off their land.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan and fellow researchers at Earshot set about to create a tool that could help challenge the construction of these turbines by demonstrating how this noise will impact life on their lands. To simulate this, the group first measured and recorded noise at the only accessible site in Europe with similar 256 metre turbines, in Gaildorf, Germany. The team then digitally mapped the propagation of this noise onto the landscape in the occupied Golan Heights at the precise locations where these turbines were set to be built.

Earshot teamed up with Jawlani musician Busher Kanj Abu Saleh who then made extensive field recordings in the area itself, sounds capturing the consonance between people and land. Over many months, he stuck the mic next to cows, bees, thunder, saxophones, shovels, weddings, sahrat, playdates, ravens , bulbul, blackbirds, a shepherd playing the flute, jackals and water pumps. Simultaneously, the team developed a virtual map within a video game platform, and then convolved both layers of sound into the simulation, allowing a virtual walk through the site. This simulation can be used by the Jawlani’s to demonstrate to lawyers and judges exactly the way lives will be affected, experiencing directly how loud the turbine will sound from any location.

Should these wind turbines finally be constructed, the simulation will serve another purpose entirely; it will serve as a sonic archive of the area before the arrival of the noise. Should the world of the Jawlani’s be fundamentally altered, Abu Saleh’s recordings within the game will become the only place where the sound of life before the turbines remains audible.

This project evolved partly through Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s close relationship with Alserkal Arts Foundation as a member of our selection committee, semi-permanent artist in residence, friend and sounding board. It was through conversations with our previous resident, Shada Safadi, that he was first invited into the Jawlani struggle for sonic autonomy.

Credits

Written and performed by: Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Scored by: Busher Kanj Abu Saleh
Saxophone by: Amr Mdah
Live Audiovisuals by: Fabio Cervi

Image: Zifzafa, 2024, still from virtual reality audio platform. Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Courtesy of the artist.