Here History Began. Tracing the Re/Verberations of Halim El-Dabh

During this Sunday’s SAVVYZAAR session we continue to honor Halim El-Dabh, through our project Here History Began. Tracing the Re/Verberations of Halim El-Dabh, as the second iteration of the project’s celebration comes to the air.

This feature brings together contributing artists to the show, Lorenzo Sandoval and Jessica Ekomane:

We will listen to the audio of Lorenzo Sandoval’s film developed in collaboration with Pedro André, entitled, ‘The Book of Vibration. Can’t you hear the whisper of one another’s touch? Travelogue from within Halim El-Dabh’s work’. The piece takes as a departure the sound and image archives gathered at SAVVY Contemporary. From these materials, the work proposes five different chapters (color, waver, mathematics, rhythm, and space) to explore the notions of divergent genealogies from the logic of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. The voice-overs of the piece alongside Halim El-Dabh are by Kamila Metwaly and Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock.

In Jessica Ekomane’s sound piece, Worlds Within Worlds we experience the resulting data of a paper, ‘Finding the Probability of Doors Being Open Using a Continuous Position Logger’ - noting rhythms and sine wave frequencies shifting in real-time. This study is an attempt at establishing the frequency at which doors are opened over time, to evaluate the safety of working places in the prevention of fires. Its authors cite the “Hawthorne Effect” as an unknown factor possibly invalidating those numbers; this term refers to the incalculable effect that behavior changes due to being monitored. In this case, because of the manager’s pressure to ensure that their building will meet safety objectives. Work cycles, whereas sine waves’ frequencies slowly alternate during non-working hours.