Reception: Dima Abou Zannad’s ʿāḥdūdil-baḥr (at the border of the sea)

First-year MFA student Dima Abou Zannad’s ʿāḥdūdil-baḥr (at the border of the sea) explores the aural elements of a multispecies world in which humans makes poems and songs whose rhythmic structures echo those of the seas.

“Arabic poems conform to a certain metrical rhythm, which remains constant throughout its entirety. Each hemistich conforms to the meter, so that each line consists of the same metrical pattern repeated twice. In Arabic, the meter itself is named baḥr. The word baḥr translates to sea,” explains Abu Zannad. Featuring Marcel Khalife’s 1980 album At the Border (عالحدود) on audiocassette,

The work was developed in conversation with ongoing research by the Elements Pod (Katia Arfara, Karno Dasgupta, Sheetal Majithia, Dale Hudson) into ways that arts practice can help humans imagine a shared planet outside the narrow confines of anthropocentrism under the auspices of the Art and Humanities Research Kitchen on the Anthropocene.