Homing: unrequited lullabies | Archive Of Belonging & Arshia Fatima Haq

unrequited lullabies is a new mixtape from Arshia Haq that builds on her research and video-project: The Archive of the Unsung. This video can be seen in full on www.archiveofbelonging.org as part 3 of the current exhibition Homing. The mixtape not only includes songs that appear in the video, but it also furthers and deepens the affective qualities of her documentary research - recognizing that feeling is as much a part of history as first-hand sources.

The Archive of the Unsung was assembled in conversation with Urdu, Dari, and Farsi-speaking Afghani and Pakistani migrants in Greece between 2021 and 2023, primarily in Athens and Lesvos. The initial proposal was to gather conversational audio and video field recordings of early memories, folk tales, regional jokes, and songs carried by migrants on their journeys. The intention of this documentation was to create an archive of cultural production, usually transmitted only orally, that would function as a site of resistance and redemption to current narratives of trauma, loss, and displacement that reduce and dehumanize migrants’ identities and agencies. In the years since the original proposal, the worsening circumstances of living conditions and the intensifying secondary effects of displacement, as well as various failures of subsequent integration, have left migrant communities with compounded traumas and disillusionment. Due to these circumstances, Haq found that what emerged beyond the hesitations around often tender disclosures and personal histories was a portrait of desire to forget what had been left behind.

In light of these emergences, rather than presenting discrete accounts or tales with beginnings and ends, the piece is a sonic assemblage or exquisite corpse between various participants that catalogs both what is remembered and what is chosen to be unremembered. The final piece is envisioned as a sort of continuous ‘musique concrète’ or composition of fractured testimony, ambient recordings of spaces that carry traces of the migrants’ lives.

unrequited lullabies is part of Homing, a four-part audio exhibition, presented online on archive of belonging (www.archiveofbelonging.org).

Each month the exhibition is reformated and a new mixtape is introduced, as something to be carried easily, and lightly. For Homing, the artists and musicians were invited to make a mixtape (in the broadest sense of the term) in response to the complex question, what are the sounds of belonging? Especially considering that sound is the first sense we develop in the womb. And hearing our mother’s voice, discerning it from background noises, is our primal step of becoming an individual while still very much being more-than-an-individual, belonging in that moment to the womb, to our first home. We know this sense of home with all of our body, by just the first sounds we hear in this world. Schedule:

Part 1: ILYICH Part 2: Tremble Borders Part 3: unrequited lullabies Part 4: Departures / Arrivals - broadcast November 4th

Tracklist