In Urdu, the word for sound, call, or cry is sada. Sada comes from an Arabic word that means “echo.” All sound is only echo. When taken from the Sanskrit root, sada also means “eternal.” The echo is how sound moves across eternity. Binding bodies across time. The echo is how sound becomes collective.

Sada, Sada is a listening session where a series of field recordings tell the story of ongoing ecological battles as echoes of a long history of water-women kinship in struggle. The listening session will be followed by a workshop where participants slowly move from a listening practice to an echo practice – here, in the heartland of extractive water technologies, where devastation has been engineered. Not quite a guided meditation, it is more like a guided agitation, or a guided annihilation. 

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research, and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent, and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across media, she explores the politics of development, displacement, and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in Karachi.