An audio walk for the Cambridge Festival 2021.

Written and arranged by Sally Stenton, Kelcy Davenport, Shaima Al-sitrawi, Nawrast Sabah and Sarah Strachan.

Audio editing and sound mixing by William Crosby.

Original songs written and performed by Shaima Al-sitrawi.

More details at: https://ajourneythroughvoiceandvessel.wordpress.com

Mesopotamian Mud: A Journey through Voice and Vessel

new audio work,  extracted from the film "Mesopotamian Mud - the third walk", which reimagines material from our recent work "A Journey through Voice and Vessel".

Commissioned by Window Room and Parkhaus15 for HERE & THERE online exhibition, 22 May 2021. 

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A year ago we had planned a walk together through Cambridge to undertake a communal experience of the story of an enchanted pot from the Mesopotamian Marshlands. Due to take place two days before the first UK lockdown, it was inevitably cancelled, but this story reemerged as an audio walk. Recorded remotely, as if the pot had broken into fragments, we tried to communicate from a distance, via online platforms, in constantly changing circumstances. Something else evolved from the process . . .

Weaving stories of this pot’s journey and the sensory connections between place, ourselves, and land, here this audio walk is presented in an expanded form, whereby the narrative elements are fragmented and the audio further abstracted into a more speculative, messy state. This new iteration is accompanied by slow, still amateur video of an encounter with mud (in its broadest conception) in each members’ locality. In this networking of elements the work suggests these interactions as a series of enmeshed encounters and performances, which ebb and flow non-linearly within themselves and between each other, across multiple simultaneous scales.

You may wish to hold or imagine holding a piece of wet earth or clay, a clay vessel or fragment of a pot.

Mesopotamian Mud - the third walk

Mesopotamian Mud: the third walk

MUD Collective are a Geology-Art-Sound research collective based in Iraq, France, and the UK. Between us we are currently exploring ‘thinking through mud’ in consideration of shifting ideas around human and more-than-human, organic and inorganic, intra-action.

MUD Collective are: Dr Nawrast Sabah Abd Alwahab, Shaima Al-sitrawi, William Crosby, Kelcy Davenport, Sally Stenton, and Sarah Strachan.