Cindy Islam – “The land I always heard”
CCA Theatre, from 7pm Tuesday 29th August.
Tickets: Pay what you can from the CCA Box Office
In this live-to-air performance Cindy Islam uses audio visual excerpts from Iraq and the UK to render the soundscape of their migration. Contemplating human movement and the inaudible or unheard sound of land, Cindy Islam creates audio environments as a way to make discoveries and connections to their herstory. The performance combines synthesised sounds, spoken words of their family and field recordings, to reconsider ways of hearing history and using techniques of listening to inform better futures. Conscious of the western gaze and the disaporic privilege to revisit war torn lands, Cindy Islam focuses on the micros, minutus and mundane, honing in on the overlooked repetitious loops of everyday experiences and noises.
Cindy Islam is a sound artist and performer inspired by Sufi principles of sound as a divination tool, a way to reconnect to the origins of creation aka the first sound, also referenced to some as ‘God’. Absent of any musical training, Cindy Islam approaches the decolonisation of sound-making through a celebration of the amateur; collaging and layering synthesised noises, frequencies, field recordings and archival sounds from their migrations between Iraq, London and Scotland. With the intention to provide a sense of access, Islam constantly reminds audiences ‘the sounds are found and not created, only reheard’. For the previous five years Cindy Islam has developed the radio project Fossilised Frequencies and founded a sound arts space in Glasgow. Both ventures consider sound art as a method toward strengthening listening practices and using different variations of internal/external frequencies to retune to essence of love.