Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher, artist, and composer with a focus on water in Palestine. Growing up in Ramallah, West Bank, she later began studying rain-summoning songs as both a communal music practice and a link between waves of water and waves of sound, which naturally led her to questions about how both have an inherent ability to dissolve borders — not only those between physical bodies or between states, but also between past, present, and future.
Working with performance, installation, and radio pieces, she focuses on how cultural practice becomes embodied in people whose communities are subjected to extreme structural violence, and how to twist and destabilize settler-colonial epistemologies that make the ongoing genocide possible by leaking through their notions of land and history, centering Palestinian agency and ways of knowing as an instigator for political revolution.
Bint Mbareh will open the Rites of Eternal Wind concert program with a solo performance built around layered loops of her own voice, alongside poetry, found sounds, and her playing the buzuq — a long-necked fretted lute prominent in Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and other musical traditions of West Asia.
