On March 11, 2018 Al-Bustan premiered new music by Kinan Abou-afach titled Of Roads and Homes, commissioned as part of (DIS)PLACED: Philadelphia | Expressions of Identity in Transition — a project documenting the experiences of 12 individuals and their families, as told by writer Ann de Forest and videographer/photographer Dave Tavani, and commissioning four artists of Arab heritage to create new work. Ann notes this about Kinan’s composition:
Kinan Abou-afach listened to the recorded interviews, read the 12 tales, and noticed a pattern emerging. Those beginnings, middles, and ends spoke to him of origins, journeys, and arrivals. No matter where a refugee or immigrant had come from, or when, they shared an experience of each of those distinct phases. Those phases inspired his composition, translated into musical movements, each with its own sonic character.
Of Roads and Homes is available for purchase on CD Baby as well as digital download through iTunes and streaming on Spotify and Pandora Radio.
Enjoy these clips from Scene 1 and A Forgotten Place, Lost Memory:
We have also published I Roll This Darkness Like A Tire — a booklet of texts on displacement written by Nazem El Sayed and translated by Huda Fakhreddine. As Huda notes about Nazem’s writings:
Nazem reflects on his experiences of displacement in a prose style charged with a poetic tendency for highlighting the ironic, the jarring, and the contradictory. In these memoir-like observations, Nazem traces his feeling of being displaced inside his family, inside his country, Lebanon, and eventually as an immigrant in the United States.
Enjoy a few pages from the booklet featured below:
