A House divided. An alternative history of Pan-Arabism

The research is titled after and based on an academic essay published in the 70s that recounts the history of the radio Voice of Palestine, a Palestinian broadcast in exile. This particular essay combines scholarship, sonic elements and dramatisation to tell the story of the (failed) Pan-Arabism project through the history of the Voice of Palestine.

2: The performance Episode 3. Les pays que j'habitent s'étoilent en archipels emerges from the Solidarity Choirs of militant women who lent their voices to historical figures in the first episode of the series La radio des images qui s'écoutent.

Drawing on her ongoing research in the Canary Islands, Yasmina Reggad will form an intergenerational whistling choir at La Gomera island. Collectively, they will compose a manifesto written and performed in Silbo gomero, an ancient Canarian whistling language. The final score of the whistling manifesto will be taught to the Solidarity Choirs of each city the episode will be performed in. The transmission of the resulting manifesto is similar to the way canary birds are taught to sing. Exclusively passed on to militant women, the transmission of the manifesto takes on a ritualistic form of struggle following the tradition of (eco)feminism.

This episode unfolds as a constellation or archipelago spanning multiple media. From the dramatised and acoustic writing of Frantz Fanon, Yasmina Reggad moves through the geopoetics of Edouard Glissant. Considering postcolonial critical ecofeminist theories in/and the phonoscene, the performative work engages with and address the history of women's participation in liberation movements. Looking at the El Silbo language as a territory in which a coloniality of power is articulated, the piece also examines the politics of (non-verbal) languages.