Program

عن الواسطة

يستكشف أهمية الوسيط في مساعدتنا على فهم
الصوت، ليس فقط كضوضاء، بل كوسيلة لرؤية
محيطنا وتجربته بشكل مختلف
شمعون بصار
صفية البلوشي
سوزان شوبلي
جون ثابيتي ويليس
محاضرة/أداء الاستجابة الحسية الذاتية الحسية مع رشا عمران

on the Medium

explores the importance of medium to help us understand sound not just as noise, but as a way to see and experience our surroundings differently
Shumon Basar
Safeya Alblooshi
Susan Schuplii
John Thabiti Willis
ASMR lecture/performance by Rusha Omran

In January 2018, I took a road trip through Oman with some of my classmates as part of a three-week course. As we drove through landscapes that felt somewhat familiar back home yet unmistakably unique to Salalah, one of my most vivid memories was our guide, Musallam, speaking in Jabali—a language I had never heard before, native to the area. The arid land echoed the environment of the Emirates, but the sound of his voice felt entirely unexpected and out of place. The language seemed to resist easy recognition, unsettling my perception of where I was. It struck me how language can contribute to the erasure of a place’s identity by being overlooked or unrecognized, yet simultaneously, it shapes the sonic landscape in ways that subtly assert presence and continuity. The experience left me reflecting on how sound and language intertwine to challenge our assumptions about belonging and familiarity.
*Safeya Alblooshi*

One of the most memorable sonic experiences I’ve had was through a screen—the first time I watched a gym chalk ASMR crushing video. What began as simple curiosity quickly turned into a full-body sensory release. The initial sound of pressure meeting chalk formed a soft, porous crack—neither violent nor abrupt, but oddly nurturing. As the block crumbled, it released a textured cascade of sounds: gritty crunches, delicate flaking, and finally, the near-silent dispersal of powder. These sounds layered like a sonic sculpture—dry, fragile, and tactile. Each moment of collapse felt intimate, drawing me deeper into a slow, calming rhythm. It was both a grounding and a floating sensation, like being in a quiet room filled with movement. By the end, I felt weightless—mentally unwound and physically stilled. It was my first encounter with sound as a tool for presence and sleep.

A specific sound experience of space that remains especially vivid to me is the rhythmic crash of waves against the hull of a boat—a deep, resonant thudding that causes everyone aboard to rise and fall. The syncopated sway turns the sea into a kind of score, and the body into both instrument and passenger. It’s in this embodied moment—traveling across water, suspended between places—that I return, again and again, when I listen to the music of pearl divers. The sound offers fragmented memories of laborers who carved out meaning and memory through sound amidst the hardship of existence between worlds. In the rise and fall of the boat, I hear echoes of grief and endurance, but also of kinship and cosmology. It is here, in the rhythm of the waves and the call of the naham, that history speaks through sound.

Recently I spent three weeks in the area around Dawson City and Tombstone Territorial Park in the subarctic region of Canada known as the Yukon wıth a group of young people. Despite the daily temperature hovering between -20 to -30 Celsius, the snow pack, while incredibly thick was dry and airy. Minimal atmospheric humidity meant that ice crystals weren't forced to cluster and cling to each other as they so often do down south. No compressed snowballs could be thrown around here. Instead the snow pillowed up in great amassing clouds and billowing folds of coldness. A natural sound baffle composed of trillions of snowflakes that muffled all noise. It was amazingly quiet, noiseless except for the exhalation of breath as it escaped my bright yellow parka. I miss the overwhelming calmness that this seemingly silent landscape was able to momentarily brought about.

Over the last decade or so, restaurants play louder and louder music, to the extent you can't hear someone from across the table, and you're hoarse by the end because you've been shouting. This might be me being firmly middle aged now, but I think it's something else: it's a low key ambient aggression. They want you to talk less so you eat / drink more and also get out of there faster. Noise is of course a pollution, but it's also a weapon, not only used by the military (think about the border between North and South Korea for example) but in every day life. When I go to a restaurant with a friend I want to talk to them. That's why I'm there. But the hegemonic consumer order today wants the opposite. It wants me to sit in silence while I'm subjected to the most virulent form of rainforest bossanova. It's time to pull the plug.
*Shumon Basar*
*Prompt for AI generated image: Draw: A man and a woman at a Chinese restaurant but the music is so loud they can't hear each other and they are screaming with frustration because they can't hear each other

جزر التراث

يركز على مساحات التراث ذات أوجه متعددة
مع التعمق في ظروفها البيئية والتحديات الفريدة
التي تواجهها
موزة المزروعي
علياء يونس وروبرت بارثيسيوس
كارلوس جيديس

Islands of Heritage

focuses on the intricate and multifaceted spaces of heritage, delving deep into their environmental conditions and the unique challenges they face.
Moza Almazrouei
Alia Yunis and Robert Parthesius
Carlos Guedes

"Friends for a reason, friends for a season", advises a man to his friend group, echoing his voice proudly of the rhythmically worded proverb he performed as his own. Overhearing makes the perfect condition for listening. "No, no, I'm not seeing him anymore; he's in the autumn/winter collection. I'm looking for a summer spring collection", says a soft-spoken girl when referring to her dating life on the phone. Stranger's Conversations seep into my audible range and draw me in; irrespective of how banal or interesting the dialogue is, I'm not biased. With no consent, I listen in to instructions, dilemmas, stories and future plans of other people's lives. No matter how interesting a lecture can be, it requires active listening, taking notes, nodding, and mind drifting. Eavesdropping subsumes my attention to dialogues I ought not to listen to. As an intrusive listener, eavesdropping demands miming and improvising social decorum: I'm busying myself on my phone, and I'm winning the prize of information. One tilt towards the speaker, and I'll be caught. To exist in propriety as public spaces demand it and to be quietly invasive as your ears desire it. Eavesdropping is immaculate in detail and innocent of hearing, making it the perfectly deviant practice of listening.

There are two sonic experiences that comfort me: One is silence: Sitting on an empty dune in Liwa. It is the only place I have experienced complete silence without fear. There was a time in my life when I was having panic attacks and my body was often shaking from anxiety, and only that silence stopped my brain from going into overdrive. As I sat there, I started to feel everything everywhere would be ok, even in the noisy places on my mind. The other sound is the whistle of boats leaving a harbor. The whistle lets me know that we are not stuck where we are –and that maybe we are on the way to somewhere that will feel like home. Sometimes though, it is also the harsh sound of leaving the comforting space. It has been one of the most common sounds in my life.

مخيلات الأرض

يستكشف التفاعل الديناميكي بين الممارسات الثقافية والسياقات البيئية والسرديات النقدية
عظمة ز. رضوي
ساليلة كولشريستا
روان الفريح

Imaginations of Land

explores the dynamic interplay between cultural practices, environmental contexts, and critical narratives.
Uzma Z. Rizvi
Salila Kulshreshtha
Rawan Alfuraih

The stories of my wayward ancestors lead me to the sea. Every time I look out at the horizon, I see a million connections and ways that I belong. Every body of water is a womb from within which some part of me has emerged. There is nothing else that I remember and nothing that I can forget about these moments. It is just the sound of an immense geography that is unbounded by time. As a child of the Arabian Sea and its link to the Indian Ocean, even when I could not see the water because of the darkness, the sound of the waves lulled me to sleep.

The sonic experience which perhaps corresponds closest to my experience of coastal spaces is the sound of waves lapping against the shores in gentle rhythmic movements. The waves which I imagine are the calm, blue oceanic water meeting the pristine beaches rather than strong, violent gusts of waves slamming against the rocky coasts. My field work at various early settlements and archeological sites around the Arabian Peninsula has helped me explore the symbiotic relationship which the early coastal communities had with the Indian Ocean. The ocean was not merely a highway which connected different regions around the western Indian Ocean but also the resource base upon which the early communities were dependent, such as for fish, salt, shells, aquatic plants and so on. It is this harmony between human societies and the ocean which helps me reimagine these ancient landscapes.

I entered a virtual world in the evening. Free Hand Coffee sits at the front of the lobby, its walls lined with dark wood and lit with soft, ambient lighting. The hotel is located on Ohio Street in Chicago, where the coffee shop opens early in the morning and closes at 6 p.m.—the same time the bar at the end of the lobby opens, which I believe stays open until late at night. During working hours on an autumn day, everyone was staring at their screens, not speaking to strangers, each person immersed in their own focused bubble. As evening fell, the coffee shop closed and the bar opened, and I remained working in a quiet corner—unaware that a new virtual world had just come to life in the same space. After several strangers began speaking to me spontaneously and informally, I realised I had entered a virtual world governed by more relaxed and casual social rules, where talking openly with strangers was suddenly acceptable. The same place—but its social rules shift twice a day, following the movement of the Earth around the sun.

زيارات المواقع

تتيح زيارات المواقع للطلاب فرصة التفاعل المباشر
مع مواقع تراثية متنوعة، مما يُعمق فهمهم لأهميتها
التاريخية والثقافية ومن خلال التجربة المباشرة
يُمكن للطلاب مقارنة
السرديات التي يقدمها كل موقع

مدحاء
عبدالله السعدي
محمد المدحاني

مليحة
نيرمال راجا
سمية الدباغ

الشندغة
أدينا هيمبل
فريد إسماعيل (إكس أركيتيكتز)

Site Vists

Site visits provide students with opportunities to interact directly with diverse heritage sites to gain a deeper understanding of their historical and cultural significance.
Through firsthand experience, students can
compare the narratives presented by each site

Madha
Abdulla Alsaadi
Mohamed Almadahani

Mleiha
Nirmal Rajah
Sumaya Dabbagh

Al Shindagha
Adina Hempel
Farid Esmaeil (x-Architects)