Nour Sokhon
Artist | Sound Designer | Composer | Moving Image
2022
Beirut Berlin Birds
...I’m just afraid I’ll be told that some documents are missing. I can’t take it anymore.”
L'Orient Today / By Zeina ANTONIOS, 22 September 2021
Leaving home or staying has been the constant theme of conversation in the past 2 years in Lebanon. The wave of emigration is repeating itself, similar to what happened during the civil war. Berlin. Paris. Amsterdam. Dubai. Montreal. The list of cities continues to perpetually grow.
When the 17 October revolution began many Lebanese diaspora flew back home to join the protests and others organized demonstrations in the cities they lived in. “Beirut - Berlin - Birds”, is a live improvisation that is composed of field recordings and objects. Throughout the composition, sounds of the bird's immigration route are recreated live, through the use of copies and samples of the required documents needed for Lebanese people to enter the EU. In addition recordings of birds collected from Beirut and Berlin, from 2019 to today are used to weave the composition together. Fragments of Beirut city ambience, recorded before October 17th 2019 are used to portray the sonic ambience of a Beirut that we once knew. Beirut before the start of this new emigration wave.
The performance took place in Theater Knossos in Athens (Greece) at the Electric Nights festival organized by Medea Electronique. The photo is taken by Natalia Tsouloucha.
Flight Mode
“Of course I hold onto the memories. If you don't acknowledge your past, you won't have a present. I don't try to disconnect.”
Anonymous - location Leipzig
Nour Sokhon (Beirut, Lebanon) and Elisabeth Liselotte Kraus (Leipzig, Germany) explore the sensorial connections and associations individuals have with their places of origin and how it affects their sense of belonging. Both artists collected research material in the form of interviews, field recordings, photographs, and objects from Beirut, Berlin and Leipzig. The outcome of the research has led them to realize that flight mode/airplane mode is a state that can only be enabled for an immigrant or a refugee when they are fleeing but not when they arrive at their stop, or final location.
An interdisciplinary output of the research gathered from November 2021- March 2022 captures a moment from the ongoing dialogues about alienation and integration in a foreign land. The research of the project was funded by the Goethe Support Fund Weaving Ties, which aims for artists, collectives and independent cultural professionals to promote international networks and dialogues.
The exhibition was curated by Clementine Butler-Gallie.
We are Here but Not all
This event is the first in-person performance together of three of the members of Heya (Sokhon, Sellner and Mekawei). In the absence of our fourth member (Hatipoğlu) we worked from Hatipoğlu’s score written specifically for this Berlin performance which took place at the Berlin School of Sound. Voice, field recordings, software and hardware were used to build this semi-improvised live sound work which culminated from several years of remote networked collaborations and shared experiences which, despite not all of us having met yet, have cultivated a space for care and hope in action.
Photos by Omar Adel and Jerzy Goliszewski.
Voyage to Neutralia
A guided audio tour along the shores of the fictional island state of Neutralia. A tour guide speaks through headphones, introducing visitors to the history of this nation state which withdrew from the global system decades ago, a move towards protectionism which would save its people from the looming climate and energy crises.
Neutralia has since prospered, developing new sustainable technologies including offshore wind farms that allow it to be self-sufficient, and a revival of popular culture that knits together its society. However, these gains came at a cost to some.
Voyage to Neutralia is a speculative fiction for a limited audience that takes place on a guided walk along Whitstable’s coastline. The work reflects on our shared crises and solutions, on what might be inevitable or avoidable, and what kind of a future we want to build together.
The work has been developed by Olivia Furber with dramaturg Ramzi Maqdisi and features sound design by Nour Sokhon, sound mix by Ziad Moukarzel, and voiceover by Caroline Faber.
I Still Remember
“I Still Remember” is part of a sound installation with Mad Time Warp curated by Joey Cannizzaro and Ramya Patnaik. It is a looping playlist that features sound artists whose work resists linear clock time; evokes hypnotic, trance, or dreams states; and opens up alternative temporal realities beyond the white, straight, & abled paradigms that constrain and suppress us.
Mad Time Warp is a part of Party Offices project ‘Queer Time: Kinships & Architectures’ at Documenta Fifteen .
Louder than words: Sites of Repair
Drawing inspiration from the ruins of the statue of the goddess Athena as signs of memory and traces of oblivion, the sound installation Sites of Repair represents a "sonic symphony", in which field recordings, and recorded material are harmoniously juxtaposed with musical compositions, pauses, fragmentary narratives of individual and collective traumas, transforming the landscape around the ruins of the Statue of Liberty into a palimpsest of symphonies. The work was funded by the Municipality of Chania and the Center of Mediterranean Architecture as part of the program “Open Sails”.
Participating artists: Alexandra Epitheti, Nour Sokhon, Evangelia Christakou
Location: Venizelos Tombs, Chania, Crete
Curation: Katerina Gnafaki
Photo documentation: Michalis Gonalakis
Sargasso Sea is an ongoing artistic research and poetic engagement with life and death in the ocean, with processes of destruction and regeneration. In the second part Sargasso Sea #2 – Aquariumthe audience is invited to dive through different aquatic landscapes together with the performers over a period of four hours. In a walk-in aquarium, we encounter bleached-out coral reefs that can only be saved by Medusa's vengeance. We stumble over the regrowing body of the sea snail Elysia, let ourselves be captivated by the songs of the sirens and get tangled up in a carpet of algae in the middle of the North Atlantic. Surrounded by these creatures, a thoughtful essay unfolds about our interconnectedness with other life forms, about loss and maritime wonders.
Inspired by the properties of the brown alga sargassum, which offers shelter and food to a multitude of marine animals and organisms on the high seas, the Sargasso Sea research project is designing a symbiotic habitat for artistic practices: based on the principle of recycling, artists from different disciplines are invited to fragmenting, rethinking or reconnecting already finished materials from earlier work processes in this environment. Her dances, sculptures, videos, voices and working methods combine with the stories from the sea to create a multimedia performance.
Initiated by Heike Bröckerhoff
By and with Moritz Frischkorn, Ilona Klein, Ben Nurgenç, Benjamin Petersen, Anibal dos Santos, Nour Sokhon and other artistic contributions from the secret agency, Kerstin Möller and more.
And who are we now? (Part 1)
Organized by the Apartment Project Berlin and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe «Chromatic Wednesdays» in collaboration with «HIVE INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM DAYS BERLIN»
With her performance «And who are we now?», Nour attempts to imagine a future for her home country Lebanon, worn-out by recent economic and political developments. They have triggered new waves of emigration of Lebanese citizens, separating families and friends from each other. Nour integrates these experiences and questions about an unforeseeable future into her sound compositions.
Heya Sound Collective - Salt Beyoğlu
This event is the first occasion bringing together all the members of the collective in person. Since 2019, members Nour Sokhon (Lebanon), Jilliene Sellner (Canada/UK), Yara Mekawei (Egypt), and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (Turkey) have been using live networked performances and collaborative sonic works; mixing and reacting to each other’s field recordings and sonic experiments. The performance is a semi-improvised live sound work based on field recordings, electronics, voices, cello, and various objects.
More information about Heya Collective is available here.