(2025)
Sound Installation
A Wandering Breeze is a site-specific sound installation within the remote desert ghost village of Al Madam in the Emirate of Sharjah in the UAE. Constructed in the 1970s, the Al Madam Village was initially developed as part of a governmental modernization initiative, specifically focusing on providing public housing to the neighboring Bedouin tribes. Being nomadic people, they did not move in.
In collaboration with the Zainat Al Sharjah singers, A Wandering Breeze brings their songs back into the abandoned sand-filled houses. The sound installation takes recordings of the singers and steadily moves them across multiple hidden speakers temporarily installed in the uninhabited houses of the village, enlivening each home before moving onto the next, creating an illusion of a chorus moving through the entire village and eventually moving outward into the surrounding desert beyond.
The sound work speaks to an Indigenous relationship with the land that is in motion, that also reflects traditions passed down from generation to generation, and in doing so seeks to reconsider the village as not a place of “ghosts,” but alive and part of an ongoing survivance.