Dates: 9 – 16 May 2026

Listening as Endurance

During my residency at Van Abbehuis, I will develop a sound-based practice that explores
listening as endurance and sound as sonic resistance.
At the center of this work is the act of playing Arabic cassette tapes from the 1980s within
European spaces. This gesture intentionally disorients and reconfigures the sonic order of the
environment. The cassette functions not only as a playback device but as a temporal and
affective medium that carries memory, texture, and presence.
Here, cassette becomes a device for conjuring [Heimat], a German word means homeland or
home. However, it describes a state of belonging and its definition is not limited to a
geographical place.
[Heimat] as sound. It collapses the distance between past and present, East and West, interior
and exterior. From a queer perspective, the act of DJing Arabic music via cassette tapes holds
fragments of desire, dance, and longing.
Playing these tapes is not nostalgia, it’s an act of insurgent presence. It says: this is my history,
this is my joy, this is my noise.
Listening as Endurance is a one day workshop engaging with local people youth and elder,
from different gender and sexuality. workshop explores listening as an embodied and
relational practice that enables orientation, presence, and endurance under conditions of
instability.
Through individual and collective exercises, participants will explore listening as a situated,
affective, and spatial practice shaped by environmental, social, and political conditions. The
workshop prioritizes experience over analysis, inviting participants to engage with sound as a
way of navigating instability rather than resolving it.