Houbara - Resonanzen Iran 2025

Resonanzen Iran - Tag #2

The third edition of "Houbara - Resonances Iran" will take place at the beginning of June. The two-day festival sees itself as a place for exchange, new encounters and shared experiences. Houbara is dedicated to artists and ensembles who question genre boundaries, creating and exploring their own worlds of sound. A meeting space for musical explorations, feminist perspectives and cross-border listening experiences - between experiment and tradition, between personal expression and political statement. This year, curator Sophie Emilie Beha and co-curator Mona Matbou Riahi are broadening the focus: It extends to multi-layered, contemporary and boundary-breaking music with references beyond Iran to the countries of the neighboring region. After all, the region known today as Iran is a mosaic of languages, cultures, histories and identities.

The program of the two evenings makes it clear just how broad this spectrum can be: the 29-year-old singer-songwriter Sanam Maroufkhani kicks things off with her newly formed quartet and wonderfully sensitive songs. The duo Stereotype got to know each other in Tehran's small, isolated, resistant underground scene and now break with every conceivable cliché with violently oscillating synth basslines and noisy syncopated beats. The band HUUUM sees various dialects, dances and melodies as a form of revolution and dresses folklore in futuristic sounds. The four musicians from Zemiene build on this the next day and combine Persian and Scandinavian folk songs. After Ava Rasti transforms the JAKI into never-ending soundscapes and gentle drones, the premiere of the new trio by Aya Metwalli, Rabih Beaini and Julian Sartorius ensures an energetic festival finale! A lecture performance by Hanna Grześkiewicz on the role of sound for the feminist revolution in Iran completes the evening.

About the title of the festival: The houbara is an Iranian endemic migratory bird that is threatened with extinction. The title also refers to "The Conference of the Birds" (منطق الطیر) by Fariduddin Attar - a great mystical poem that is one of the most important works of Persian literature. It describes the pilgrimage of thousands of birds of the world in search of an ideal king. In the end, thirty birds remain - and realize that they themselves are the king they are looking for.

Program Day #2
4^th June 2025

19:00 | Concert hall
Hanna Grześkiewicz: Sounding a Revolution - Feminist Resistance in Iran

20:00 | Concert hall
Zemiene

21:00 | JAKI
Ava Rasti solo

22:00 | Concert hall
Metwalli/ Beaini/ Sartorius

Curated by NICA artist Sophie Emilie Beha. In collaboration with Mona Matbou Riahi.

Hanna Grześkiewicz: Sounding a Revolution - Feminist Resistance in Iran

Sounding a revolution: Feminist Resistance in Iran

In the three months following the murder of Jina Amini by the Iranian morality police on September 16, 2022, Iran was gripped by a feminist revolution. Hanna Grześkiewicz's lecture performance explores this revolution and its ongoing resonances almost three years later. It brings together the voices of scientist Chowra Mekaremi, Golchehr Hamidi Manesh from the Only Voice Remains collective and Behrooz Moosavi from the Tehran Contemporary Sounds festival, as well as songs, chants and sounds in public space.
Sound is used as an instrument to unravel the complexity of a revolution, to hear its vision for the future and to capture the memories and hopes of a community. This lecture performance revolves around two main questions: What does the revolution sound like? What role does sound play in a revolution?

Zemiene
Zemiene combines Balkan, Persian, Baltic and Nordic stories, temperaments, folk songs and soundscapes. The four musicians have different backgrounds, values and cultural perspectives. They describe Zemiene as the fertile common ground where the seeds for connecting cultures are sown through music: "Music is the medium to come together and tell our stories as young artists in our global present. Through our music, we connect people in a way that only music can, reminding us that despite our differences, we share a common humanity."

"Zemiene" is a Latvian word that describes the flat and fertile land in southern Latvia. "Zämin" in Persian and "Zemin" in Turkish mean "the earth". In addition, "Zemlja" is another similar-sounding word that means "land" in Slovenian. With every performance, Zemiene reminds us that music has the power to bridge divides and bring people together.

Ava Rasti solo
Ava Rasti is a Tehran-born musician, composer and artist. Her music reveals Rasti's interest in storytelling. She experiments at the intersection of ambient, contemporary classical and drone music. As a teenager, Rasti founded a post-punk girl group in Tehran, today she chooses much more moderate sounds and plays piano and bass guitar.

Metwalli/ Beaini/ Sartorius
The premiere of a brand new bundle of energy forms the crowning finale of the festival: singer Aya Metwalli, producer Rabih Beaini and drummer Julian Sartorius all ended up in Bern via detours and have now joined forces. Their music is inspired by noise pollution, broken loudspeakers, the underworlds of techno, tension and relaxation. Metwalli scatters her linguistic constructs between microtonal Arabic maqams, out-of-tune opera and animal sounds. Rabih Beaini specializes in grainy, imaginative analogue techno. And Julian Sartorius forms unheard, expansive patterns with his playing.

Click her for the programm of day #1