Unsettling Sounds: Iran & Afghanistan

The series »Unsettling Sounds« by the Berlin Trickster Orchestra brings together poetry and musical sounds that express existential contemporary upheavals. Across the globe, humans are confronted with threats to their existence from repressive regimes, the loss of freedom, unequal treatment, racism or displacement. Such existentially destabilizing experiences can hardly be expressed in rational language.

»Unsettling Sounds« uses contemporary music and poetry to form a new expression for the subjectively experienced conditions of our time. As part of the "Goethe-Institut in Exile" project, the Trickster Orchestra, under the direction of Cymin Samawatie, will present a program on Iran and Afghanistan on this evening. The concert, co-curated with the Afghan writer and women's rights activist Mariam Meetra, focuses on two countries in which many women are struggling for their right to life, participation, and self-determination. In the face of such threats, the Trickster Orchestra creates an acoustic form of expression of global interconnectedness and interdependence that gains presence in trans-traditional sound. In many places around the world, music and poetry have never been strictly separated from each other. The poems by Forough Farrokhzād (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 expressive capacity of spoken language in impressive images. They reflect upon the lack of freedom and focus on female perspectives in inner and outer exile. Ultimately, they revolve around the question of how inner consciousness can find recognition while being marked by suffering, the loss of one's homeland, and the struggle for freedom. While the trans-traditional lineup sets poems to music, new improvisation concepts and forms of instrumentation enable the integration of inner conditions into collective sound. Playing instructions on conflicting 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, brokenness, and at the same time the search for agency. They reflect the complex shades of female experiences in the struggle against oppression and enable us to perceive and identify with inner consciousness in order to strengthen its being.

Goethe-Institut in Exile

The Goethe-Institut im Exil project was founded in Berlin in October 2022 and aims to support artists and cultural workers from countries in which the Goethe-Institut and other international cultural institutions have had to close their locations due to war or censorship and to maintain existing networks. In addition to artistic and discursive program formats, the activities focus on networking with various cultural scenes and community work.