Performative Screening: Our Songs Were Ready for All the Wars to Come by Noor Abed

Join us for a performative screening of Our Songs Were Ready for All the Wars to Come, 2021 , super 8mm film with live sound performance by Dirar Kalash.

Choreographed scenes based on historicised folktales from Palestine. The work aims to create a new aesthetic form to re-awaken latent stories from the folklore, ones that are mainly based around water wells and their connection to communal rituals around notions of disappearance, mourning and death.

The work explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. Viewing folklore as born from land and specific sites, how can it become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn the characteristics of the dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?

While Dirar Kalash will compose and perform live music alongside the film, the only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. Captured through mediums of film and sound, situated stories are archived and represented, creating a context that explores the capacity of social formation, and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralising images of fixity; a memory that is liberated from monuments.