In search of a forgotten commonality, we approach collective listening. Where bodies, geographies, and timelines converge through listening and overlaying of languages. In this listening session, pantea, a member and facilitator of Khamoosh’s community, shares sounds from the Khamoosh sound library while inviting participants to contribute to this listening session by submitting a recording of their everyday lives. This recording could be the sound of working, cooking, an open window, a poetry read in one’s mother tongue, a garden, or a slice of everyday life. We approach languages as sound and sound as a knowledge medium. Questions and unfamiliarity tickle the imagination to search for commonalities of feelings, synchronicities, and co-constitutions of languages and borders.

The mix of sounds selected for this event is partly made with participants’ contributions through a digital form that would be shared with the audience beforehand. Participants are also invited to bring a sound recording on a USB or (their) poetry to read in any language they wish. An important part of this invitation extends to the staff working in Santa Monica, especially those not directly involved in the artistic productions such as the cleaning staff.

Khamoosh is a participatory transdisciplinary research community that mediates conservation and restoration by exploring the sonic heritage of Iran through recorded sounds of everyday life; sounds less heard or even silenced. This process-based project aims to build an interactive archive of sounds and to exchange, resurrect and decolonize these sounds using artistic methods. Our methodology is guided by an ongoing process of learning by doing, community-based participation, collective artistic practice and research as a network.