https://www.poemontrial.org

Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was convicted by an Israeli court in Nazareth of “incitement to violence” for a poem she wrote. She spent a total of THREE years under house arrest and in prison, between October 2015 and September 2018. On December 25th, 2018 she stood before the court once again, appealing against her verdict.

A group of artists and activists issued a call inviting musicians to contribute to a digital compilation album in protest at Dareen’s conviction, called Poem On Trial. This album, in tandem with a radio broadcast with Dareen, was released on November 11, 2018.

The project aims to undermine and expose the true basis of her conviction by repeating and distributing her ‘illegal’ poem via the medium of music and art. 

#poemontrial team: Meira Asher, Antye Greie, Liam Evans, Yoav Haifawi, Smadar Yaaron and Dganit Elyakim.

Produced by Meira Asher for Radioart106. 

Playlist from the album #poemontrial (2018):

Isabel Nogueira – Resist them 

Anne-Line Drocourt – écrivez moi en prose dans le bois d’agar

Monika Pich – For Ali

Isa Stragliati – R E S I S T S I S T E R

Ismael Gherzoul – DAREEN

Dror Feiler – Resist my people resist

Dalila Tehami – قاوِمْهُمْ يا شَعْبي

Selma Zghidi  – اوِمْهُمْ يا شَعْبي

Tavishi – You are not alone

FeralMind feat. Claudia Wegener – Resist

Dixie Treichel – Resist them

Osea Merdis feat. Samira Deeb  – poem on trial

AGF – RES-IST-for Dareen

Image by Muhammad Jabali

An abridged version of a program, produced by Meira Asher for Radiokunst-Kunstradio ORF Vienna, in the frame of the Nebenan – Erkundungen in Europas Nachbarschaft: Israel Serie.

kunstradio.at/2018A/04_02_18en.html

1. North Jordan Valley 2018 (by Meira Asher)

There is a project by the Israeli state to make life intolerable for the Palestinians remaining in the Jordan valley, the West Bank, for the purposes of de-facto annexation of this land and its resources. This introductory composition is focused on the evacuation and demolition orders issued to the Palestinian communities by the Israeli Civil Administration.

Voices: families of the North Jordan Valley, Guy Hircefeld, Meira Asher

Lexical assistance: Liam Evans

2. The Sea That You Cannot See (by Dganit Elyakim)
dedicated to Haitham Khatib

I asked my friends to describe the sea to their beloveds from the other side of the barrier, the ones who are prevented from approaching it.

The actor, director and writer Mohamad Bakri described the sea to his friend Hassan; Hanan Zaid Elkilani, a young, emerging art student, portrayed the sea to her father’s friend, Prof. Ahsan Eldick, from Nablus; Maya Felixbrodt (viola) played for the freedom fighters Ahed (16) and Nariman Tamimi from Nabi Saleh; Adaya Godlevsky (harp) dedicated her playing to the children of Palestine; and Samira Saraya painted the sea in words and sang for her family in the refugee camp in Jenin.

3. Lascia Vibrare: There’s a Family Living (by Eran Sachs)

Dedicated to Michael Zupraner

At the center of this piece there is a field recording of a family, captured from a distance. On first listen there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about this recording; but over the course of this reportage it becomes apparent that the act of documentation may register more than one might have initially suspected.

4. An Audio Guide to Occupation_part01_A-D (by Ma’ayan Tsadka)

an audio guide to occupation is a sonic archive, using found materials from the daily life in occupied Palestine. It makes use of minimum sound manipulations.Mostly isolating moments, categorising, and at times layering. It is intended to be an ongoing documentation

The complete program can be heard here:

https://soundcloud.com/meiraasher/from-the-red-sea-to-the-dead-sea-a-soundscape-of-an-occupation-2018

www.meiraasher.net

www.misscomposed.com

eransachs.wordpress.com

www.maayantsadka.net

Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of compositional and improvisational contexts. His performative and compositional approaches to instruments, techniques, and aesthetics are highly political as they challenge dichotomies, hierarchies, and binary logics of new/old and west/east as tools of cultural imperialism and hegemony. The methods he uses are based upon his research into the intersections and relationships of music and sound with other contexts such as language, architecture, mathematics, visual arts and further social and human sciences. His regular solo and collaborative performances include but are not limited to audio-visual performances, free jazz groups, string ensembles, solo piano, and live electronics.

Silence measured with blood

“… I did this piece along one other in 2009, during the assaults on Gaza, not much thought was done during / before I did it, so it’s totally improvised using short samples from different sources, some were sent by friends, some from news broadcasts.. I remember i just plugged in my equipment and started playing, the thoughts i had in my mind were of persistence against the evil and shameful forms of silence: moral silence, ethical silence, impotent silence, corrupt and innjust silence… but at the same time that persistence was also directed inside, as a form of resistance.”

“wily dancing with twenty one passing winds”

“Holding onto the will // wily dancing with twenty one passing winds” is a no-input-mixer piece, mostly improvised, but with a direction in mind, moving from ambient drone sounds to harsher sounds, not simply as an attempt to structure a certain form, but rather as a focus on content an expression which are essentially poetic, as the starting point for the work was the title as a poetic expression that gravitates close to a human gesture. However, the choice of a no-input mixer setup, as a purely machinic-electronic setup, which essentially contrasts a human gesture with a machinic one, came out of the need of a live and interactive setup that could allow a variety of sounds and noises which could be approached as raw and primal, however commonly heard as “feedback noises”, yet they allow for a particular tension that constitutes a creative framework which is able to merge experiment with experience, due to the unexpected “feedback based” nature of this setup, the choice of such musical and sonic tools also raises questions on the possibilities of sonic and poetic condensation.”

https://albayan.bandcamp.com