Friday 8 September 2023, 7.30pm
* Please note that Jaar's set will not be included in the livestream on the website - only Marina Eichberg and Sami El-Enany. The livestream will be live on this page from 7:45pm on the night.
Exist is a festival and event series founded in Palestine, with the aim of building bridges between artists, musicians, DJs and curators from Palestine and across the globe. Its broad, transnational family are united in a desire to use art to impact their environments in critical ways, and through their engagement with anti-colonialism in the context of Palestine and beyond. Originally founded in 2019 by Odai Masri, Exist has since taken place as an ephemeral but impactful meeting point for musicians and artists who care for the Palestinian cause, and manifest this care in how they love one another. We've listened to our music, grown our family and danced together for hours in Ramallah, Amman, Beirut, Athens, Oslo and Berlin; now we've invited our collective to grace Cafe Oto and The Yard in London. The festival now defines itself as a growing family of siege-breakers who refuse to let Palestinian artists confront injustice alone. Exist is proud to bring together film, talks, music, performance, and dance events from underground veterans such as Choronzon and Drew McDowall as well as super powerful Exist heads like Kujo and Dirar Kalash.
This festival is generously funded by the following parties:
Tony Tremlett
Laure Genillard
DRTCO
Other People Imprint
On Friday the 30th of June 2023, Odai Masri aka Oddz, the founder of the festival suddenly passed away, leaving us with an abundant and deep conviction of what a generous ancestor can do for us.
We owe Odai the vision and groundwork for the accomplishments of this festival, its tightly knit network, and most importantly, we owe him our ethos of marrying uncompromising sound curation with uncompromising caregiving. He insisted on queering Palestinian narratives while resisting victimhood by acting as one another's care structures. This edition acts as a moment to remember him gracefully and extend gratitude for the time we were lucky to share with him. We invite our audience to act as carriers for these memories which we are so privileged to be able to keep with us. Exist is Odai's legacy, and we insist on keeping it strong, fearless and bound by love
Nicolás Jaar, 34, was born in NY to Chilean parents and raised between Santiago and New York. Since 2008, he has released music under various guises spanning shades of pop, ambient, noise, and club music. Since 2013, he has curated the Other People label, releasing the visual & audio work of artists Maziyar Pahlevan, Africanus Okokon, Jena Myung, and the music of Aho Ssan, Saint Abdullah, Dienne, Pierre Bastien and Lydia Lunch among others. In recent years, Nicolás has mainly focused on education, teaching sound-editing and listening workshops to emerging musicians and non-musicians alike in institutions such as the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago, Chile, AdBK in Munich, Germany, free.wav in Attappadi, India, Festival 4x4, Chiapas, Mexico, Dar Jacir and Alrowwad in Bethlehem, Palestine, among others. His latest project is called "Archivos de Radio Piedras". It's a 3h 1/2 long radio play set in the near future in Chile. His debut collection of stories "Isole" was released by Timeo, an Italian publishing house, in February 2024. Nico is also part of the "Shock Forest Group", "Darkside", and was one of the founders of "Musicians for Palestine".
Marina Eichberg is a Palestinian violist trained in classical music. Her main passion as a Freelance Violist lies in Orchestra and Chamber music, be it with the modern viola or the historical viola, she is also one of the founding members of Alafia Ensemble and Ishtar quartet. Marina currently is based in Cologne, Germany.
For Exist Festival, Marina will play pieces for Solo viola including Garth Knos‘s ‚Quartet for one‘, Chahgir by Alan Hovhaness, 2 Ricercari by Gabrielli arranged for Viola among other pieces.
Sami El-Enany is an artist who works with sound, fraying the edges of modern classical, electronica, storytelling and found sound. His score for Walking With Shadows (2020) was nominated for an Africa Movie Academy Award and his tone poem Creation of the Birds (2022) has received accolades from Grand Prix Nova, BBC Radio Awards and Phonurgia Nova. His work is regularly broadcast across the airwaves and his spatialised compositions have filled spaces including the ICA, Tate, Barbican, South London Gallery and Frieze.
As a musician and improvisor, El-Enany is currently developing tape collage techniques as a tool for listening and reflection. The source material for the tapes are a scrapbook of rejected film scores, exploratory recording sessions and found sound spanning his travels as a field recordist. El-Enany narrates the tape collages with improvisations at the piano.
