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The NEXT 2025 festival will bring five days of contemporary and experimental music, performances and discussions to Bratislava. These will include the symposium ‘Listen, empty, occupy: On the Weaponisation of Sound’, which will focus on how sound is used and instrumentalised in contemporary military conflicts.

The symposium will feature a workshop led by Palestinian sound artist Bint Mbareh.

re-choir-ed presence
re-choir-ed presence is a workshop of improvised choir singing for non-musicians. Everyone who attends is invited to explore their voices in different ways. And often in ways you might not expect.
During the 1.5-hour workshop, Bint Mbareh will present vocal exercises that are neither verbal nor musical. They respect those present in the room at that moment and how their voices sound together. No musical or technical background is needed, but a desire to scream with absurdity, comedic intent and bewilderment is a necessary condition for attending.

Together, we will work through these exercises:
– Collective reading, which ultimately flips language until it becomes meaningless.
– Shared hums, where, for us to maintain the hum as a group we have to desynchronize our breaths so that we can breathe comfortably, but the hum still carries through strongly.
– Creating strange sounds, which we will share with the group through echo and then correct the group’s delivery of the sound that we invented. This will allow us to teach each other how to listen and use our sound-making facilities (throat, nose, mouth, ears and face) in ways other than we have tried in the past.
-We may nominate a group member to be our despot, giving us dynamic instructions or instructing us on how to make our loud hums. 

The exercises bring music back to the collective, away from the solo genius, back to the body, away from the cerebral, back to anonymity, and away from data extractivism, back to opacity, and away from being intelligible to the systems that harm us.

Bint Mbareh
Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally, similarly to being enveloped by a water body. She challenges Settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to political revolution.
https://bintmbareh.today/

Realised with the support of public funds from the Slovak Arts Council and the Bratislava City Foundation.