International Visitors Programme
As part of the International Visitors Programme, Mo’min Swaitat was invited to present workshop during the one-day symposium Living Archives: a Celebration of Design and Digital Culture at the Nieuwe Instituut on 20 June 2024. The workshop Palestine Sound Archive: Listening as an Embodied Tool aimed to unlock histories, memories and folklore, and look at how material culture houses sounds, stories and sensations.
Participants explored the concept of the archive, what it means to them, who has access to it, and what embodied responses it can evoke, using artistic media such as clay and charcoal. The themes of the workshop were inspired by Momin Swaitat’s own background as a Palestinian Bedouin artist who comes from a long line of musicians and oral storytellers. He also shared his experience of setting up first Palestinian-led record label focused on reworking, reissuing and re-examining sounds from the Palestinian archive – a part of which he also shared with the participants in the second part of the session.
On 21 June, Mo’min Swaitat contributed to an evening focused on sonic archives and heritage at Murmur in Amsterdam, hosted as part of the Nieuwe Instituut’s ongoing research project Through Sounds. The event, Through Sounds X Palestinian Sound Archive, focused on working through and with sonic archives and cultural heritage as a way of documenting, sharing and remixing sonic histories to find new ways of archiving. A presentation of Mo’min’s archival work and project was followed by a conversation and listening session with Golnoosh Heshmati of Khamoosh, Bence Meijer with his project Archaic Inventions, and Tabea Nixdorff, who works with sound archives and publishing. The evening was hosted by Through Sounds initiator Federica Notari. The evening programme ended with a dinner to bring the sonic practitioners together to exchange thoughts, ideas and knowledge.