VIDEOGRAM 122
Exist Festival
This Videogram is hosted by Bint Mbareh, one of the earlier believers in Palestine's first festival for underground music - Exist Festival. Exist's first iteration took place in November of 2019 already with a regular lineup of legends, all who came to Palestine motivated by a commitment to the liberation of Palestine and the connections that music could make to facilitate some freedoms for Palestinian artists, and what shared learning can take place once a group like this had the chance to meet. Since then, there's been an Exist in Athens and Berlin, several takeovers of radio stations like Threads and Refuge Worldwide, and there are many others being planned, and many alliances being forged until the next iterations of Exist take place. This talk is about how and why we started Exist and the challenges we faced along the way, and our ambitions as a young but very hard-working collective.
3.5.2023, 19:00 CET, online (click for the Zoom link)
BINT MBAREH
Bint Mbareh works with all formats of sound (radio, live, installation and many others) and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing human and more than human. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. The songs that she learned helped communities summon rain, and at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is and communally determine how to share resources, mainly the resource of time, fairly. Bint Mbareh makes music and sound today because she believes these uses can still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary communal upheavals, still looking for these significations in the Palestinian landscape, now in the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses. She has been a practising artist since 2018.
Bint has performed at Mophradat's Read the Room festival (March 2022) and at the Hiya Live Sessions in Dalston’s Jago (May 2022). She co-founded Exist Festival in Palestine in 2019, She was Café OTO's Youth Music Resident for 2021, She has shown sound and object work at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, curated by SWAY Barry, Qanat, and LE18 in Marrakech in August 2022. She has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of Unsound Festival's December 2022 Weavings curated by Nicolás Jaar. She has shown sound work at the Mardin Bienali in May of 2022 invited by Adwait Singh, as well as at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh in July 2022, invited by Sakiya and Cooking Sections. She represented Exist Festival in 2022's edition of Tehran Contemporary Sounds. She was Mophradat's Art Time Resident at BUDA Kortrijk's NEXT Festival in 2021. She has performed several times in London's Shubbak and AWAN Festivals.
Secondary sources
Exist Festival & Label linktree
documenta fifteen. The Question of Funding (profile)
Margarida Mendes. Reconciliation with Hydrotrauma (lecture, 2022) (audio)
Ifor Duncan and Stefanos Levidis. Weaponizing a River (2020)
Astrida Neimanis. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017)
Remi Kuforiji. Water No Get Enemy: Counter-Cartographies of Diaspora (video, 2022)
Zahra Malkani. Mehran, Mitr (2023)
Abdellah M. Hassak (portfolio)
Kate Molleson. Interview: Elanie Radigue (2017)