Fatima Lahham and Bint Mbareh present a performance-based and participatory workshop exploring metal, water, non-linear time and vocal echoing. This session focuses on the cassette tape as a medium that can echo the departed (because of migration, strife or death) and haunt the present. Fatima and Bint Mbareh explore some of the sonic possibilities of the cassette tape with a performance aiming to bend what is in the present and what is past, palimpsestic histories written in multitudes, precious in a way, but constantly erased for new urgencies, trailing behind them a mosaic specific to each improvised moment.

After the improvised performance, audience members will be invited into a series of shared vocalisations lasting around 90 minutes. Non-musicians are especially encouraged to participate. The vocalisations will focus on how participants leak, rust, flood and burst, thinking with water, metal, and the the ways we experience and express rage. This segment offers the audience an opportunity to play with the words metal (music/structure/liquid metal) and water (vapourised, mysticised, hidden in the body) in their many formats. The exercises will include slow buildups to louder and louder voices, collective readings of shared texts, and other possibilities depending on the group.

This event is the sixth and final in a public programme series curated by researcher, writer and sound practitioner Syma Tariq. Full programme listings can be found on our website.

Artist and sound researcher Bint Mbareh lives and works between London and Ramallah. Her interest in physical parallels between water waves and sound waves has led her to question border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses) and investigate potential similarities between being enveloped by the voice and being enveloped by a body of water. She challenges Israeli settler colonial epistemology by reclaiming Palestinian ways of knowing – from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage – as instigators for political revolution.

Fatima Lahham is a musician who improvises with her recorders and voice. Her practice is influenced by baroque music, birdsong, dhikr, Fairouz songs, and sounds of the sea. Fatima is based in London, where she has performed and led workshops at spaces including Cafe Oto, the Feminist Library, the Crafts Council, and the Gaza Biennale, as well as in Austria, France, Germany, Utrecht, and Cairo. Her solo album bulbul (FS Records) tells stories about birds, homes, and the spaces in between. Fatima is also a researcher and writer, using creative methods to explore ideas around music making, healing, and improvisation. Her first book Improvising Otherwise (Open Book Publishers) was published in 2025, and she currently works at the University of Manchester as a Hallsworth Research Fellow.