From colonial newspaper to piano score: A Symphony of Archives transforms historical traces into living sound. In this conversation from the Ultima Festival in Oslo in 2025, curator Francesca Ceccherini (Zaira Oram) speaks with Ash Kilmartin about territory, memory, and the notion of «situated listening».

Ash Kilmartin: I'm happy to welcome listeners, both here in Vega Scene and on Radio WORM, to this listening session and conversation about A Symphony of Archives, a composition and sound performance by Moroccan artist Abdellah M. Hassak.

Francesca Ceccherini: I'm very glad to be here presenting the work A Symphony of Archives, which was initially presented in Zurich in 2022. I was curating the program of OTO Sound Museum, together with the curatorial collective Zaira Oram, and we decided to invite Abdellah. We collaborated on different levels, as researchers, as artists and curators, and as friends both interested in colonial and repairing issues. A Symphony of Archives was realized as a composition and performance that transforms archives into living material. Abdellah has a methodology based on three perspectives. The first one is that he works on territory, which means that he's interested in exploring geography from an anthropological, cultural, historical, and political perspective. The second is memory, because he works through the documentation, construction and interpretation of different sources. And the third one is using emerging sound technologies, often bringing different instruments together. A Symphony of Archives grew from collecting material from colonial archives including the Arabic-language newspaper Es-Saada, which was published in Morocco from 1904 to 1956, the year of Moroccan independence. It was a French organ to disseminate colonial ideas and strategies of domination.

Abdellah worked with the material to write a score, as a reinterpretation and re-signification of colonial traces. Georgian-Swiss pianist Tamriko Kordzaia was invited to perform the score on the piano – the musical instrument of bourgeois Western culture – a gentle provocation from Abdellah, while also creating a new version of the archive. So what we are going to listen to is the recording of the pianist’s performance.

AK: I find Abdellah’s methodology of working with these cultural artifacts of colonial propaganda really resonant, because he's neither ignoring colonialism nor trying to erase it, nor being nostalgic in any way, nor coming up with a direct rejection. Rather he's adding a counter-voice or a counter-narrative, and then deriving a new musical code from that. Listening in the room with everybody here now, I really felt it as «code». I could almost hear certain articles from these old papers being addressed one at a time and interpreted differently as code. You have this very staccato use of a single note or alternating notes that feels binary, on or off, or like an alphabet. We are not filled by the sound all the time, but there are waves.

What I find so rich in Abdellah's radio project, and Mahattat Radio too, is that he's finding ways of telling history or talking back to history in a way that is outside of the dominant cultural narrative. How did you first engage with Abdellah for this work?

FC: Abdellah and I met in 2021 in the context of the digital platform of OTO Sound Museum, where we presented his composition titled A Symphony of Cities, which follows the same methodology I described. Building on this first collaboration, we decided to develop a proper production in the physical space in Zurich. At the beginning, his methodology was not immediately easy to grasp. His way of working and shaping sonic material is very subtle, and can only be fully understood over time.

In the early stages of the research, he began telling me about this heritage, several newspapers dating from the era of French colonial domination that he collected in many markets across Marrakesh. What does it mean for a Moroccan person to get in touch with such material, traces of colonial control and authoritarianism? I think it is not easy to deal with it immediately, as these are among the tools that have inflicted much suffering. I believe, however, that the central concern for Abdellah lies in determining what to do with this material and how it can be transformed, manipulated, repurposed. We cannot just erase it, we cannot just recognize it. Through these questions, Abdellah tried to develop a sonic interpretation of this archival material, and to respond to the research by also involving other people in the elaboration of the work and its meanings. For this reason, the idea of resonance and what he calls “situated listening”are central to his practice: interpretations and responses are never fixed or definitive, but constantly evolving, also through the participation and listening of others. It is a process that I recognize in certain artists who work with traumatic memories, and who arrive at initiating it as a process of repair.

AK: What does a situated listening practice look like for you?

FC: It's something that extends beyond the room. For example, I'm here, listening with you, so the situated listening is physical, but I'm also carrying my entire heritage. I have been a listener, a curator, and a friend of Abdellah, as well as the granddaughter of a survivor…. I was the Mediterranean witness of these colonial stories as they were reinterpreted by him. From my curatorial perspective, situated listening also resides in our bodies, in our state of mind, in our memories, and in the vibrations we feel at a specific moment in space and time — it dwells within our beings, in our past and present struggles.

 

LISTEN TO THE FULL AUDIO VERSION OF THE TALK