As we are witnessing the recent escalation against the Palestinian people in Gaza, Jerusalem, Hebron, Haifa, and basically everywhere in Palestine, we are calling for a series of concerts and events to take place wherever and whenever possible, under the title of “NOT SILENT”.
We would like this to develop into a series, a call to organize continuously and simultaneously, just as the oppression of Palestinian people is a continuous process that should not be viewed as a one-time or occasional massacre. It is about the struggle of millions of living Palestinians around the world who are denied their basic rights, from returning to their own land to the access to clean drinking water and electricity.
We aim to form a global community of concerned artists and organizers who are able and willing to take a stand and hold these events as a means for action that challenges the current cultural discourses and methods, as well as the notions of ‘solidarity’ itself. Palestinians do not ‘need’ a stand to help them get along with their fate, but rather we should be responsible for making a real change, not simply from the position of being ‘informed’ on the issue, but from an active position that challenges our media and cultural discourses in which Palestinians are – at best – only being viewed as victims of acts of “misconduct” by the Zionist occupation, and where our knowledge and perception of the Palestinian issue becomes subject to “counting victims” and getting angry or frustrated from one massacre to the next. We know this is going to happen, but we do not want to think of Palestine only when this happens, thus we need to speak out and take a much more solid stand, not only for the victims, but for the living as well.
The first event in this series is going to take place in Amsterdam at OCCII, followed by another one in Berlin at The Workshop. Upcoming events are currently being planned and organized and will be announced in time. This call is a method to create a network of organizers, artists and cultural workers, and should not be viewed simply as global event in “reaction” to what is happening in Palestine.
In this edition of NOT SILENT, Dirar Kalash will perform a live concert of Oud music.
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.
Liz Allbee (b. 1976) is a composer/performer residing in Berlin, Germany. She performs most often on trumpet, self-designed quadraphonic trumpet, electronics, and voice. Her work encompasses improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, and instrument creation, often focusing on issues of embodiment and extension.
She performs regularly in Europe and the U.S. and has appeared at such festivals and venues
as Maerzmusik, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Darmstadt (Germany), San Francisco
Electronic Music Festival (US), Huddersfield (UK), Wien Modern, (Austria) among others.
She is the recipient of funding and grants from Initative Neue Musik, Musikfonds, Berlin
Senat, the European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation, and Berlin
Arbeitsstipendium and has been Artist-in-Residence at Kunstmeile Krems, Austria, Avatar-
Quebec, Q-02 in Brussels, and STEIM in Amsterdam. Allbee completed her M.A. in Music
Composition at Wesleyan University in 2013.
Besides solo work, main projects and collaborators include the Splitter Orchester, Pareidolia
(w/Marta Zapparoli), Ganzfeld (w/Sukandar Kartadinata), The Elks (Fagaschinski, Roisz,
Zapparoli), and The Liz (Liz Kosack and Korhan [Liz] Erel).
workshop-on-forster.de 