Summary
The Work
In the fall of 2022, Remix ⟷ Culture launched the Tanfis project - a series of multidisciplinary residencies facilitating collaborations between NY-based traditional musicians, storytellers, remix artists, and DJs each time focusing on a particular grouping of underrepresented and/or misrepresented communities. Building on the success of the Tanfis I program, with its sold-out live premiere, we began work in July of 2023 on Tanfis II, this time with an incredible selection of 14 NY-based artists from the Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi diaspora communities, many of whom had not met prior to this program. Together, they explored ways to honor, celebrate, and amplify their community-rooted music and stories, and at the same time reimagine them. For each artist - as an individual, and as part of a collective - this exploration was a deeply meaningful one, as it touched the heart of the questions “who am I?” and “who are we?” These explorations attained a heightened sense of urgency in the wake of the escalating ethnic cleansing, dehumanization, and erasure of Palestinian lives and culture. Over the course of several months - through a combination of in-person residencies in upstate NY and NYC and remote / independent work - the project unfolded as follows:
July ‘23 - Open Call for Artists
Aug ‘23 - Selection of Artists and Planning
Sep ‘23 - First residency (upstate NY)
collectively defined the themes, music, stories, and approaches that best serve the project
selected and created original arrangements of community-rooted songs
recorded and filmed beautiful performances of the community-rooted songs
Oct ‘23 - Second residency (in NYC)
collected, recorded, and filmed interviews and storytelling content
edited and remixed the recordings and films of music and stories
created custom digitized tatreez (traditional Palestinian embroidery) patterns
Nov ‘23 - Third residency (upstate NY)
co-designed a 3-hr live experience weaving in all of the creative explorations of the residency (in the form of acoustic music, electronic remixes, video projections, storytelling) into an immersive tanfis journey
Dec 1, 2023 - Live premiere at Funoon.
Jan 15, 2024 - Second presentation of live experience at Roulette.
May ‘24 - Digital release of all content produced as part of this program. Open invitation for new remixes to be created by remix artists worldwide, in accordance with our open-access and fair trade model.
Next Steps:
The Tanfis II live event will be on tour in California in October 2024.
Continue to partner with music presenters (nationwide and worldwide) to bring Tanfis II live to audiences near and far
Why Tanfis?
This series is centered on the theme of tanfis, which usually translates as "catharsis," but in the Arabic context is understood as the journey of the nafs (self/soul) from a place of stuckness to liberation, from the holding of breath to an exhalation. The situation for many people living in the SWANA region, and those of SWANA descent in the US, is imbued by a longing for tanfis, particularly for Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Iraqis, whose communities have and continue to suffer from violent occupations, civil wars, displacement, and the erasure of their cultures, histories, homes, communities, and humanity.
Within the SWANA cultures, we find that traditional musics - and complementary arts of dance, storytelling, embroidery, cuisine, comedy, etc - are technologies designed to bring about tanfis for the individual, and to stitch together the fraying social fabric. And while many contexts for traditional music have disappeared, we see the need to create new spaces in which it can flourish, evolve, and be remixed by means of the contemporary traditions of electronic music and video art.
photos by Conrad Clifton and Darwensi Clark
Music Releases
Tanfis II Live
On Dec 1, 2023, we premiered the fruits of this collaboration for an audience of 300+ at a new space in Brooklyn called Funoon. Then, on January 15, 2024 we presented a new and improved version of this Tanfis II live experience at the iconic Roulette Intermedium, with its cinematic video projection and world-class sound. At each event, over the course of 3 hours, we took the audience on a "tanfis" (catharsis) journey, seamlessly harmonizing acoustic traditional music and electronic audio and video remixes, deep listening and dance, storytelling and trance, embroidery and video art. The response from attendees was overwhelmingly positive and deeply appreciative for our important offering in this time of increased oppression and dehumanization of the communities served by this project. Above is a full-length video from the January 15th live experience.
Below is a 5-min highlights video from the Tanfis II Live premiere at Funoon in Brooklyn, NY.
Below are two photo galleries that captured the collective presence palpable at the Dec 1, 2023 and Jan 15, 2024 events.
Jan 15, 2024 - Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn, NY)
photos by Darwensi Clark
Dec 1, 2023 - Funoon (Brooklyn, NY)
photos by Darwensi Clark
Meet the Artists
Artist Bios
What The Artists Wished To Express
Nahed Elrayes’s “Why I Love Gaza” series on Instagram
Lina Barkawi Tatreez Artist (Palestinian Embroidery)
Testimonials
Join Us
We hope you were moved by the work we’ve presented here. There are several ways you can join us!
We are actively working on taking Tanfis II live to California in October 2024. If you’d like to help make the tour a success, please contact us here.
If you are a music producer / remix artist, we’d love for you to join our open access fair trade remix community by downloading our free (Creative Commons) Tanfis II sample packs (Zalazil and Freedom Dabka Group), and sending us your remix via email at remixes@remix-culture.org
If you’re moved by our work and would like to support our mission, consider making a donation today. If you’d like to become a sponsor, please contact us here.
We are grateful to our institutional funders. Tanfis II was sponsored, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). Their financial support enabled us to cover about half the cost of the Tanfis II program.