Weaving Memory into Sound

Short Essay

In Leila Bencharnia’s performance Fatema U Trab (Fatima and the Dust), sound is not simply something we hear – it is something that is woven, touched, remembered, and transmitted. Wool, rhythm, gesture, breath, and prayer form a field of sonic material intelligence, where listening becomes a tactile and imaginative act.

Beyond Form and Symbol

The carpet and the loom, matrices of memory and imagination, intertwine in Fatema U Trab (Fatima and the Dust), a work by sound artist Leila Bencharnia, who explores through sound their evocative power and their ability to awaken the imagination and the senses.

The carpet in question is a form of artistic expression that belongs to the Amazigh textile arts of Morocco: centuries-old artistic practices that originated in a feminine, rural, and non-Western context. Rooted in daily labor and environment, these practices generate autonomous forms of abstraction that long predate Western avant-garde experiments.

During this long history, the beginning of the 20th century marked a major moment of change, as imperial domination dismantled historical heritage, artisanal know-how, and traditional practices. By the end of the French protectorate, textile arts were absorbed into ethnographic narratives and colonial, later tourist, economies.

Despite these upheavals, the free and independent production of textile works – carpets – continues. Carried out in the privacy of homes and accompanied by songs and prayers, it integrates memory and emotion through the intelligence of the hand, expressing women’s experiences from the concrete to the abstract and from the individual to the collective.

Visual and Sound Polyrhythms

The space of the carpet, with its repetitions, rhythms, grids, and disseminations, like a page of a manuscript or a musical score, combines two modes of abstraction: ornamental and musical. Its language of signs, deeply meaningful to the artist-craftswomen, links and captures several realities between nature and culture, but is not and never has been intended for interpretation or discursive commentary. Rather, it leads us toward a form of clairvoyance of the invisible and an expanded field of perception involving sight, feeling, and hearing. In this expanded perceptual field, where the senses begin to overlap and shift, the visual no longer functions as the sole point of access. Suspending the visual intermediary also makes room for non-optical materialities that are more elusive and mysterious, which add up, culminate, and intertwine. A multisensory experience, then, where the «touch-see» of the carpet is transformed into sound.

This logic of perception extends directly into the performance itself. In Fatema U Trab, Leila Bencharnia performs with voice, piano, wool, and found materials, working directly with the strings and surfaces of the instrument. Through gestures of striking and brushing, a tactile relationship between body, material, and vibration emerges.

Fatema U Trab explores multiple layers of sound and vocals that are vivid and light, embodied and abstract. Nuance, modulation, and atmosphere alter the imagination and the horizon of thought, producing a vibrant, textured, and grainy soundscape. These stratifications are both the present of a memory trace – actualized in performance – and its past, marking the lingering forms that time can take.

Score of Fatema U Trab (Fatima and the Dust) by Leila Bencharnia (2025)

Cosmic Harmonies

This plurality of time unfolds as a polyrhythm, making perceptible the resonances between social, ritual, poetic, and musical rhythms. By translating the structure of the carpet – its threads, knots, and weaves – into sound and movement, Fatema U Trab draws on incantatory songs, trance, and ritual practices to shape a soundscape that opens connections between body, memory, and the invisible.

African fractal mathematics and the Amazigh alphabet are other models of composition that the artist uses to open up new spaces for notation and to challenge the knowledge forged by the rules of classical music education. Leila Bencharnia promotes an approach to music that is not based on a logic of notes, but on raw sound material and improvised gestures.

For the Ultima Festival 2025, this approach took the form of a spontaneous and tactile relationship with the piano: the artist intervened directly by striking and brushing the strings of the instrument, questioning the status, functioning, and musical hierarchies the piano represents.

This approach is associated with ethical and artistic questions around the creative act, in which issues of unlearning are recurrent. It reflects the artist’s need to deconstruct imposed compartmentalization and to explore embodied, non-bookish forms of transmission, often sustained and activated by women within their communities.

Because it draws on gesture, material practices, incantatory chants, trance states, and sacred environments, Fatema U Trab offers a soundscape woven from multiple textile and musical intelligences. In doing so, she makes room for cosmic thinking, that of the «great All» where music, body, energy, objects, gestures, instruments, and the experience of time connect and respond to each other in a unified field of perceptions.

Biography

Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa is an independent curator and researcher. She began her professional career in Morocco at the National Museum Foundation, then at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art as head of cultural programming (2013–2018). She is interested in the layered subjectivities of European modern art history and the construction of Moroccan modernism through the works of artists engaging with the vernacular. Her research is oriented towards the sociology and history of the artistic avant-garde in Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s. Follow her on Instagram.

Published on March 19, 2026

Last updated on March 24, 2026

Topics

Colonialism

Tradition

Experiment

Utopia

All Topics

Special

Dust and Frequencies

Snap

print as pdf

Like in music, in fog, knowledge appears in layers, and not all of it is to see. (photo: Shubham Kataruka/Wikimedia Commons)

In Defence of Treason

Short Essay

by TIm Rutherford-Johnson

What does it mean to be unfaithful in music? Listening to a conversation with composer Ahmed Essyad, our author reflects on why breaking loyalties may be a necessary condition for musical truth.

In her 2008 cello solo Invisibility, the Australian composer Liza Lim engages with systems of spiritual and ancestral knowledge practised by the Yolngu people of Northern Australia, in which knowledge is layered, concealed, and unevenly accessible. As a non-Yolngu composer, Lim is granted access only to a certain depth – knowledge that, in accordance with Yolngu law, she is not able to share.

I found myself thinking about this while listening to the conversation between Ahmed Essyad and Katia Truijen at the recent Ultima Festival. Essyad spoke of the treason that was inevitable when trying to reconcile two different musical cultures, of being «unfaithful» to oneself and one’s convictions.

Invisibility works through these ideas on several levels. On its surface, the music’s striated sound echoes the cross-hatching «shimmer» of Yolngu paintings. This is intensified by the use of a modified bow whose twisted hairs produce a rough, irregular tone, adding crackle and depth to the cello’s sound. For the cellist this creates an unstable, resistant surface that defamiliarizes the instrument. With repeated listening, further layers emerge.

Much of Lim’s work appears, on Essyad’s terms at least, to be treasonous. Born in Brunei to Chinese parents, but raised in Australia within a European-style education system, Lim is already a participant in several different cultures. But her artistic practice deliberately reaches out to many more: Japanese calligraphers, Norwegian fiddlers, even coral reef fish. It is as if she cannot embark on an artistic project unless she first destabilizes herself and her sense of identity.

To be clear, Essyad does not see «treason» in wholly negative terms. He seems to consider it a necessary and even productive evil. Nevertheless, I was struck by his use of the word. Because treason implies that cultures are defined by sets of rules and accepted usages; that they are a kind of bureaucracy of meaning that one can be treasonous against. But Lim’s music suggests a different kind of exchange. With Invisibility, for example, she was able to participate in the gift-giving, trust-making and knowledge-sharing economy of another culture, and then bring those experiences to bear on a work of Western classical concert music.

What I find particularly interesting is that Lim’s music is highly literary, often notated with extreme precision. On paper, it belongs to the same Western tradition as the total serialism Essyad rejects for its insistence on fidelity to the written sign. And yet, it is from that insistence – the demand that the performer work, as best she can, within highly specific notational constraints – that the flexibility Essyad seeks emerges. It is like squeezing a stress ball: the places where it pops out from the gaps between your fingers are the places where it is most like itself. The ball needs the restrictions and the pressure of your hand squeezing it to truly become what it is; the music needs an over-abundance of signs.

Towards the end of his conversation with Truijen, Essyad mentions Franz Schubert: the economy of his music providing a potential space for orality, and therefore truth. I note this because Schubert’s music is also some of the most widely transcribed, quoted, and reworked in history. From the transcriptions Liszt began to make only a few years after the composer’s death in 1828, to countless quotations in the music of present-day composers (including Lim), dozens, perhaps hundreds of composers have been «unfaithful» with Schubert’s music.

And those references have all been made within a literate musical economy, on the basis of the written signs of Schubert’s original scores. Yet each of these acts of unfaithfulness is a creation: something positive and new. Perhaps that was just Schubert’s gift – to create perfectly fungible units of transparency and ambiguity – but perhaps treason is also necessary, and inevitable. Both here and in Lim’s culturally delicate exchanges, listening becomes a question less of loyalty than of responsibility.