Following the Sun. Adrasha

The project mebrat / Հայանական is born from an ongoing investigation into lighthouses understood as an unusual architecture that, paradoxically, resonates with both the idea of guidance and that of border. The experimental artist and sound DJ has dedicated time to studying the different periodicities with which lighthouses emit light, and has translated them into various rhythms and sounds.

Moving away from the nautical connotations of the lighthouse, the sound performance seeks to connect with emotional and geopolitical complexities such as homeland, the need to travel, composite identities, changes in communication and mutating destinies, through a series of field recordings and autobiographical samples: audio recordings of friends and family in Ethiopia and Spain, interwoven with textures of his own voice and maritime motifs.

This sound collage —with a collaboration by Bamba, from the Jokkoo collective— becomes a meditation on the fragility of memory and identity, origin and destination, acceptance and resistance.

Adrasha is an Ethiopian multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. She began her career as a dancer in Addis Ababa, influenced by traditional and urban sounds from the Horn of Africa. Focused on exploring underground sounds —in particular, contemporary club music from the African continent and its diaspora—, Adrasha’s work attempts to create a dialogue between hybrid sound expressions, such as Afropunk, Gqom, Future Dancehall and current experimental electronic music.

A session within the framework of the second edition of Following the sun series, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani