The City's Polyphonies of Sound 

In the hearts of our buzzing urban landscapes lie intricate tapestries of whispers, echoes, pangs, and crescendos that shape our everyday experience. Yara Mekawei invites us to a new chapter of her series investigating sonic mappings across cities – this time with us, in the district of Wedding.

Yara Mekawei invites us to move with the dynamic interplay between architecture, digital sound art, and the philosophy of listening within urban realms. As metropolises continue to transmute as living and breathing organisms, we want to listen to polyphonous cities that reverberate, deflect, and reflect diverse rhythms of their inhabitants and spaces.

Joining this walk, you will be part of an interactive sound walk through Wedding’s streets, where we will engage with the choral and incomplete mappings of our neighborhood's sonic stories, as well as architectures of resonance and perception. In a world saturated with visual stimuli, the workshop intends to shift the focus to the auditory, hearing latent and active histories that weave the fabrics of urban existence. Yara welcomes us to this session of listening and composition, for people of all backgrounds and interests. Together, we will attune to the street’s low and high frequencies and their (in)visible hauntings, present into future and past. A following composition by Mekawei of the workshop’s sonic makings will be aired on our SAVVYZΛΛR radio.

Yara Mekawei is an artist and scholar working with sonic expression as her center. Her creative work delves into the realms of philosophy, architecture and urban landscapes, social historiography, and literature. At the core of Mekawei's artistic philosophy lies an intricate interplay of time and space, honoring a bridge that spans the ancient and modern. Her creative practice is deeply research-driven, paying homage to history by weaving threads of myth with the sinews of old and new technologies. She is currently working on a forthcoming sonic opus woven from the poetic narratives of Sufi philosophy and the methodological wisdom within the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

Mekawei has performed and shown her work internationally at SHUBBAK Festival (London, 2021), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, 2021), Rote Fabrik (Zürich, 2019), MEMPHIS Gallery (Linz, 2019), Halle14 (Leipzig, 2019), Dakar Biennial (Dakar, 2018), Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival (Johannesburg, 2018), Cairotronica festival (2018), Lagos Biennial (Lagos, 2017), and Biennale méditerranéenne dʼart contemporain dʼOran (Oran, 2014) among others. She was a DAAD Music & Sound Fellow in 2021.