Collective listening as a political action. Ejrad will present sonic counter-narratives from the Edinburgh student encampment which mobilise the transformative power of listening as a bridge towards solidarity, action, and change.

Overview

In their debut performance, Ejrad, will be presenting a sonic archive of the 2024 University of Edinburgh student encampment and the 42-day student hunger strike of 28 students. This direct action emerged as a response to the Univeristy of Edinburgh’s direct financial investments in AI weapons used to accelerate the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The insitutional lack of accountability dates back to the University’s former chancellor and imperial-statesman, Arthur James Balfour’ 1917 whose declaration laid the foundation for the Zionist state.

Here the students moved their solidarity into action, rejecting the bureaucratic timeline that denied the demands of justice.

Through field recordings of the encampments, meeting with university administration, and hunger strikers testimonials, Ejrad retraces the unprecedented pressure put by students towards divestment. The performance is an assemblage of reclaimed time and the politics of refusal. Through electroacoustic collaging, the resonance of the many, is proclaimed by the talking over and through the loop of institutional stonewalling.

Ejrad sounds out the spaces of liberation, moving away from the empty time of colonial dispossession, towards revolutionary time, one that inhabits remembrance, redemption and reparation, constantly unfolding when we situate ourselves in the absolute present.

*The recordings were never made with the intention of becoming an archive, but from the immediacy of the encampment itself.*

Context

Masa participated in Episode 11 and Counterflows 2025. In doing things together; as well as one-off compositions or improvisations, we’ve been coming to think about Masa and Hajar’s sound performances as emergent moments in ongoing organising work. In keeping with a lot of the anti-denialist thinking and works at Episode 12, they animate and emanate from a continued struggle against ongoing structural oppression and the silence it so violently imposes. By refusing to go along with state, institutional and social silence which acts to deny—and so in reality condone—settler colonial aggression, their performances are also temporary parallel social spaces in which they invent and circulate counter-discourses. Maybe we could say that collectively listening back to heightened, focused compositions of recordings from collective struggle helps them to formulate oppositional understandings of their place within those struggles: their common successes, challenges and needs. This practice of counter-narration, testimony, re-membering, real time electro-acoustic composition and insurgent calls for justice and revolution speaks to many of the themes and other practices across the Episode.

The music programme at Episode 12 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.

Content Notes: Loud noises and overlapping sound. Includes recordings from demonstrations and from people participating in a hunger strike.