Unsettling Sounds: Iran & Afghanistan

"Unsettling Sounds" formulates a new expression for the subjectively experienced conditions of our time through contemporary music and poetry. As part of the "Goethe Institute in Exile" project, the Trickster Orchestra, under the direction of Cymin Samawatie, is presenting a program on Iran and Afghanistan this evening.

The concert, curated together with the Afghan writer and women's rights activist Mariam Meetra, focuses on two countries in which many women are fighting for their right to life, participation and self-determination. In response to such threatening situations, the Trickster Orchestra creates an acoustic form of expression of global connectedness and interdependence that gains presence in transtraditional sound. In many places in the world, music and poetry were never strictly separated from one another.

The poems of the poets Forugh Farrochzād (1935–1967), Mariam Meetra (*1992), Shafiqa Khpalwak (*1996), Cymin Samawatie (*1976) and Atefe Asadi (*1994) in Farsi, Dari and Pashto articulate the limits of the expressiveness of spoken language in impressive images. They look at lack of freedom and focus on female perspectives in internal and external exile. Finally, they revolve around the question of how inner consciousness marked by suffering, loss of home and the fight for freedom can find recognition.

When setting the poems to music, new improvisation concepts and instrumentation make it possible to incorporate inner states into the sound. Playing instructions for clashing frequencies and disharmonies cause acoustic disturbances to which the ensemble is unexpectedly exposed. Structures dissolve into soundscapes that do not calm down, that do not find their place.

The sounds and poems thus share an emotional terrain of pain, conflict and, at the same time, the search for agency. They reflect the complex shades of female experience in the fight against oppression and enable us to perceive and identify with inner consciousness in order to strengthen its essence.