Ibrahim el Hesnawi, Tripoli/Libya 2025
(My continent of Africa, Beware the Vampires)
The live draws upon the title borrowed from a song by Ibrahim Hesnawi, pioneer of Libyan Reggae who sparked a musical movement that endured political violence following Gaddafi's “Cultural revolution” in the 1970s, when music was exclusively produced to serve the state’s ideological propaganda. The collaboration between Libyan artists Tewa Barnosa and boo.m is a sonic quest to explore Reggae as a site of resistance in times when Pan-African solidarity is shadowed and punished by imperial systems.
The audiovisual performance examines the spatial convolution and temporal rupture in connection to the often complexified socio-political landscape of Libya. While African indigenous music was banned, artists were exiled and instruments were burned in public squares, Ghaddafi was capitalising on Pan-African propaganda as an ideological means to strengthen his position on the continent, however, the spirit of African unity had already existed across generations amongst its people. The exploration of Arabic speaking Reggae in Africa, folkloric Libyan music and oral poetry, sampling and field recordings conducted in Tripoli, transforms into a soundscape that lives through an original soundsystem handmade by Azadi collective, giving homage to the sonic resistance movement in post-war Jamaica, that played a pivotal role in shaping music culture worldwide.
Archival footage and manipulated CGI imagery, render visible a narration on what has been erased from the public eye – the engineering of the European colonial projects feeding on Libya as an infrastructure of the military industrial complex resulting in the orchestrating of militias, mercenaries, proxy/civil war, land extraction and detention centers.