Delta Listening: Abdellah M. Hassak, Siestaria, Loma Doom and Ash Kilmartin
Delta Listening’s live events conclude with a series of listening sessions by Abdellah M. Hassak, Loma Doom, and Siestatia, with an opening reading by Ash Kilmartin.
Sma ou L’ma is a listening session with Abdellah M. Hassak. This sound performance invites listeners to explore the immaterial memories of water and the spaces it occupies—both physically and symbolically—as the artist develops an original sonic narrative using a blend of archival material and his own compositions. The artist navigates between real and imaginary territories, using techniques of memory collection and the creation of a geographical imaginary.
Through sound mapping, he integrates recordings from various cities in Morocco and abroad; examining rivers and oceans, through their tangible aspects and through dreams and cultural representations.Rather than simply presenting sounds, the session invites the audience into an immersive and reflective experience.
Siestaria is an artistic research project that considers radical rest and listening in dreams as a means of resistance and the oneiric realm as a refuge for tuning into the disobedient aspects of the self that do not want to adjust to the ruling canons of efficiency and need a place to emerge. Siestaria proposes repose not as absence or pause, but as a generative ground for reimagining how we live, relate, and resist together. For Delta Listening, they will offer a moment of collective napping in which they invite participants to dwell in a soporific mode of listening, letting themselves be carried by voices and sounds, while attending to those that surface from memory and imagination. Bring your pillow!
About the artists
Abdellah M. Hassak is a sound artist, DJ/music producer, and art director, born in Casablanca. Abdellah shapes sound as a material to create sound pieces, performances, acts, and installations. His creative process is often collaborative, involving communities. Currently, his research focuses on memory, which he uses as a creative process based on interaction. He is fascinated by the way humans inhabit their environment.
Listening is at the center of his practice, beyond sound, as a means of grasping the imperceptible or as a pretext for meeting others. His work draws attention to the beings around us. He is interested in the imaginary and the contemporary interpretation that can be made of it, in the dialogue between humans and the context – natural or urban – in which they live, and in what voices tell us beyond words. https://ahassak.wordpress.com/
In 2014 Abdellah founded Mahattat Radio, where he conducted radiophonic and sound research in interdisciplinary projects with various communities. He is also a co-founder and art director of 4S’, a Moroccan NGO that carries out the FeMENA project, dedicated to the empowerment and professionalization of local music industry actors. He is currently developing a syncretic Afrofuturism music project with a field recording practice as a producer/DJ, under the name Guedra Guedra.
Loma Doom
Florencia Curci and Tatiana Heuman of Siestaria began their sonic journey as drummers in the underground of experimental music in Buenos Aires Argentina, they met improvising, playing and hitting drumheads and objects in their respective bands COSO and Ricarda Cometa. They have come together multiple times to work in different constellations such as the transfeminist sound platform #VIVAS and the current project Siestaria, dedicated to navigating crisis through rest, caring and listening to dreams. Tatiana and Florencia have worked together in HKW (DE), CASo (AR), and Festival Tsonami (CL) among others.
Through an intersectional lens, Siestaria attempts to reflect on the imposed structures that frame sleep and rest in the context of capitalist labour as simply a zone of energy accumulation before further effort. The main methodologies that guide their practice are listening and somatic movement-oriented methods. They create durational concerts for sleeping audiences, not as performances delivered from stage to spectator, but as shared spaces of rest, often co-created with participants through mutual trust, listening, and presence. Alongside these, they offer shorter nap concerts, installations, and workshops that invite collective experimentation with stillness, sound and oneiric states.
Florencia Curci is a sound artist and curator. Through radio experimentation and artistic research, she aims to develop collective tools to challenge and resist dominant monocultures. Tatiana Heuman works at the intersection of sound, media art and movement research. Her current projects revolve around the expansion of the sensory field. https://siestaria.com/ – www.tatianaheuman.com – www.florenciacurci.com
Ash Kilmartin is an artist, writer and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Rotterdam. She is interested in the uses and meanings of the speaking voice and in finding ways to document the small moments of private and collective experience that shape the way we think our own lives. She likes to play with the gaps. From 2020 to 2022, she opened the doors at a shop called LIFE. Since then, she is part of the team behind Radio WORM, and the publishing collective Short Pieces That Move! www.ashkilmartin.net
About Delta Listening
Delta Listening is a series of performance-based events, workshops and radio broadcasts that foreground listening as a creative and critical practice. Delta Listening brings together artists and researchers to reflect on the role listening plays in our relationships to each other and to our environments.
Convened by Brandon LaBelle and Ash Kilmartin, Delta Listening is named for Rotterdam’s location in the Rhine/Meuse/Scheldt delta, and the idea of listening as an agent of change: Delta being a symbol for variation. We invite audiences to listen for and with difference.
