Divine intervention

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"The audio that I selected for this project is of a call to prayer in Uzbekistan. In the sound I created I wanted to showcase the role and the power that religion has for people who are in migration.
"This work is drawn on an intersection between the fieldwork I did while working along the Bosnian/Croatian borders and the field recordings I took. These sounds can be heard in the background such as the sounds of walking, speaking, cars driving, etc.
"I wanted to mix the story of my experience doing migrant justice work in Bosnia, to the sounds of the call of prayer. My desire to do this, came from coming to understand the power of religion in spaces of migration, liminality and precarity, and the way religion can be used as a source of hope and strength.
"The people I met while working in Bosnia, would always say phrases like “al hamdillah”, god bless, after describing happy moments in life, but also after describing tragic encounters of border violence while trying to cross the borders. I was always shocked that even in telling stories of the violence they experienced they would follow it by using this phrase.
"But through the many conversations I had with people, I have come to understand that through moving in the borders they are confronting by the fullest and truest extent of state sanctioned violence. They are confronted by the magnitude of the state, but what is bigger than these governments which are inflicting injustice on them? God.
"There is something incredibly powerful in knowing that there is something higher than that which is oppressive. So, for my sound piece I decided to depict a journey, as described in countless testimonies of movement, but mix it with the sounds of the call to prayer in Uzbekistan. The call to prayer fades in and out, yet it is always there, always protecting and empowering."
Samarkand old city reimagined by Masa Nazzal.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGES: RyansWorld, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons