Tanfis III : Black and/or Indigenous to the “Americas”
(Launched in 2024) We recently closed our open call to artists for our third Tanfis residency program and will soon be announcing the selected resident artists.
Tanfis II : Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq
(Launched in 2023) Second iteration of our Tanfis residency series, showcasing 14 NY-based artists from Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi diaspora communities.
Tanfis I : Southwest Asia and North Africa
(Launched in 2022) First iteration of our Tanfis residency series, bringing together 11 NY-based artists from Egyptian, Iranian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Tunisian, and Turkish diaspora communities.
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. For a walk through for our latest Tanfis program lifecycle watch the video to the right.
Tanfis is an Arabic word which translates to "catharsis," but in the spiritual and mythological 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. For the many communities with whom we collaborated, 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.
Each Tanfis program consists of the following phases:
Open Call for Artists
Multi-week In-Person Residency during which we collaboratively:
define the themes, music, stories, and approaches that best serve the project
record and film beautiful interpretations of the community-rooted songs
collect, record, and film interviews and storytelling content
edit and remix the recordings and films of music and stories
co-design a long-form live experience weaving in all of the creative explorations of the residency into an immersive tanfis journey.
Premiere the live event locally
Digital release of all content produced as part of this program.
And while the program officially ends here, it continues to live on in a regenerative way both online and in-person. Each digital release serves as an open invitation for new remixes to be created by artists worldwide, in accordance with our open-access and fair trade model. And we actively seek new opportunities for the live experience to travel to new audiences.