https://muqataa.bandcamp.com/  

I have had the pleasure of knowing him personally for sometime now, and had numerous in-depth conversations in the past few years, but we didn’t have too many opportunities to catch up properly since we saw each other at The Prequel in Monheim in 2024, so we began our conversation starting there in a surprisingly warm day in April. 

Muqata’a: “Monheim Triennale’s 2024 The Prequel was a super interesting experience for me, because I had a chance to meet and play with many great musicians. Although it’s not really my thing to be thrown into these kinds of jam sessions, they all actually went well. I think it was because of the level of the musicians, everything basically sounded good. There was a kind of automatic chemistry that happened on stage. I’m not sure about the other musicians, but I didn’t go through any rehearsals with anyone, so we didn’t really warm up at all. We just got on stage and played. I admit, I was nervous in the beginning, but then when that happened, it was actually really fun. And it was good to connect with people coming from quite different musical backgrounds.” 

After The Prequel, he took on the offer to use the artist residency space in Monheim for about three weeks last December, together with filmmaker Fairouz Hasan to kickstart their entirely new collaboration project. 

Muqata’a: “It wasn’t originally meant to be developed as my signature performance, but towards the end of our residency, we were asked if we wanted to present it as a performance. Even though we didn’t feel like we were ready for it, we decided to try something short. It was about 18 minutes long. But it still put us in a spot where we really had to consolidate all these elements and ideas together and try to make it into something that’s presentable. We had a lot of footage and sounds, and a large part of the performance was improvised, but we felt like it went pretty well. We had a lot to work on, but it was our first time performing together. For Fairouz, it was the first time ever to perform live with video. She’s used to doing more post-production editing and directing, so she usually does more in-studio work. It was an experience for both of us, and because we both felt positive about how it went, we decided to continue working together. That’s how it became my signature project.”

Imperfect Reconstruction

His collaborator, Fairouz Hasan, is a young talent based in Bethlehem, Palestine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch their first performance in Monheim last December, so I asked Muqata’a to describe her practice. 

Muqata’a: “Fairouz is a film-maker focusing mainly on short films. Her work often revolves around the issues of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and she works between fiction and non-fiction, in quite experimental ways. 

She uses microscopic images in an attempt of reconstructing what’s broken, and trying to put things back together – even though they’re already broken. So, to her, it’s a way of trying to understand this process and why. It obviously translates to our political and social reality in Palestine. The idea that things are broken and that there is a kind of reconstruction that’s always in place. And the question of what that means and what the psychological effects of this process are. 

She works a lot with insects. Dead preserved insects. She would have broken wings, and she would try to put them back together under the microscope, and film her attempt. This thing of trying to fix what’s unfixable, without actually aiming to reach any result, and being stuck in that process.  

Her attention to the detail and the microscopic images relate to the way I work sonically as well, with how I focus on micro sounds. And how things are always falling off, not completely rigid and quantized in lace. I also always have aspects of limping or being broken in my work, that are then stuck in an attempt of being reconstructed again somehow, but never in a perfect place. It has a lot to do with the concepts I’ve worked with before. Like my latest album, Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص, means ‘whole imperfection’ or ‘perfect imperfect.’ So, we really clicked on that idea and we based our performance on this kind of concept.”

While still work in progress, he explains that the performance they will present at Monheim Triennale 2025 will not be simply a continuation of what they developed last December. 

Muqata’a: “It’s going to be something else. On the musical side, it will be much less beat-driven or structured. It’s more fragmented, incorporating really small sounds, clicks and glitches. But also, there will be a lot of sub-bass at the same time. So, it’s like this bed of bass is carrying other bits of tiny but sharp sounds. And on the visual side, there will be plenty of microscopic images. There will be lots of archive material. There’s a lot of footage that’s been filmed on the way from one place to another in Palestine. Such as the scenery outside of a car while it’s moving from one city to the other, showing how fragmented Palestine is, as a geographical place, how things are cut off from one another, and how broken things are in general, combined with the microscopic images of broken bodies of insects such as butterflies and dragonflies, and geographic nature of Palestine as well.”

Fragmented Reality

In the current historic and extreme moment for Palestine, it’s not hard to imagine how challenging it is for them to work as artists – in every aspect. In terms of developing new work in such circumstances, I wondered if they feel compelled to present their perspective in their work, or if that just comes out naturally in whatever they do anyway.  

Muqata’a: “I think what you said correlates in a sense that, yes, it’s definitely about the place we are in, which is Palestine. That’s basically our point of view. This is how geographically fragmented it is by the settler colonial state of Israel, and how that affects the way you see everything and the way you move, the way you compose, and the way you take footage. Even while you’re filming footage, you have to turn off the camera many times because of the danger it can put us in. So that also becomes fragmented. The act of gathering your elements to create a performance is always interrupted by the colonial reality of Palestine. There are checkpoints everywhere. There’s the wall that distracts your view of what you’re filming. That changes the view of its nature and changes the view of the land. That’s what we’re addressing here, but in an abstract way. 

We’re using footage from Syrian films, we’re using footage from Iraqi films, we’re using sound samples from different places. It’s not only from Palestine, but we do have footage from Palestine and field recordings from Palestine to express how we feel, to put it through our lens. And we’re trying to create a new narrative using different influences. That’s where the sampling comes in from the archival video footage, for example. And we’re trying to express how we see things and how we feel towards these things artistically.”

Imposed Uncertainties

The physical disconnection from home or between family members, friends, or collaborators also seems to be a constant challenge in everything Palestinian artists do. The reality of occupation places enormous and unimaginable obstacles in the way of otherwise simple activities such as making plans, having appointments, traveling from one city to another.  

Muqata’a: “Even when I am in Palestine, we live in different cities. Ramallah and Bethlehem are very close to each other geographically in kilometres. But then to reach Bethlehem, you have to go through Jerusalem. With my West Bank I.D., I’m not allowed to go through Jerusalem, so I have to go around Jerusalem and go to another city and take another highway. Then it takes me about two hours to reach Bethlehem, even though it should be about 20 minutes.  

Then there are multiple checkpoints. You never know. Sometimes they’re closed, and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s very intense. Sometimes it escalates, sometimes, even when it’s extremely calm, you never know what could happen. You can be passing, and be stopped for two hours at a checkpoint for no reason. It’s always for no reason. Every time it’s different. 

It’s also this inconsistent feeling that we have all the time, that we never know what’s coming. We never know how long it will take. I can never take my time and anyone’s time seriously. If I set a date and time and be like, “I’ll be there at 2 pm,” then I have to leave at like 9am to be sure that I’m there. Even though the maximum time it should take is an hour or two hours. This inconsistency, I feel, is a psychological state that they put us in, that Israel puts us in as a colonial power. They always put us in this state of mind where we’re uncertain about anything. 

This idea of never being certain. It’s the same for Palestinian prisoners. A large number of them don’t have a specific sentence, so the family of a prisoner is always waiting for the prisoner to come out. They say he has a court date in three months. And then that gets postponed. You think your family member is going to be out in two weeks, and then three months pass. There’s no certainty in anything. I think this whole aspect of fragmentation and inconsistency is also translated into our work, in the rhythms, sounds and visuals that will constitute our performance.”

Consolidating as a Whole

Muqata’a’s constant evolution as an artist is quite remarkable and representative for many other artists from the same scene – Ramallah’s experimental hip hop community – to be engaged in MCing, producing, DJing across various genres. In the case of Muqata’a, after the release of his solo rap album, he almost entirely stopped MCing and focused on producing beats. How does he choose between these different modes of expressions, and what possibilities does he see in each? 

Muqata’a: “For me, it was never about focusing on one specific thing. It was more like where I saw myself at the time. Yes, I haven’t been rapping for years now since I released Hayawan Nateq  حيوان ناطق in 2013, which was fully a rap album. When I first started making music, I was only producing beats, and then I started rapping because I couldn’t find any rappers to rap on my beats. There was so much to be said too. I was living with my parents at the time, and our apartment was surrounded by Israeli tanks. And I felt like there’s so much more to be said than just instrumental music, so I started writing and I rapped on it after like a year of thinking about it. That’s how it started for me. 

At some point, years later, I decided to go back to the core of why I started making music, so I went back to focusing on production. And during that time as well, from around 2011 to 2014, I was also part of a group called Tashweesh, which was with Basel (Abbas) and Ruanne (Abou-Rahme.) Together, we formed this sound and image-based performance group where we toured for about two or three years. But after the release of my hip hop, rap album, I started focusing more on my rap stuff and I was playing shows as an MC, so this project slowly faded out because we were all very busy with our solo work. We eventually did a few more shows later but it kept disintegrating with time. So, yes, I have worked a bit with performances incorporating visuals before. 

To me, it’s less about being a new endeavor, but more about collaborating with that person, with Fairouz and the conceptual ideas behind it. So, to me, it’s not like exploring a new thing. It’s more like, “we want to work together.”  

I still work with rappers, and I still work on my solo stuff. I’m also writing (rap lyrics) again a lot now. So, I’m planning on having some new material with me rapping on it, my production as well as other people’s production. I feel like I’m at the stage right now where I’m combining everything I separated before. I stopped seeing them as separate things and separate projects. I rap, I produce, I work with visual artists, I work with other rappers, all of them together. I make ambient music. I make noisy, glitchy music. I make classic hip hop tracks. All that together is who I am.”

Bilna’es and new Methods of Surviving

Another creative activity he has been engaged in for the past few years is the running of Bilna’es – which is not only a record label, but also seems to be a platform for printed materials. I asked him to elaborate on the idea behind it, and its significance as an artistic practice for him.

[Embed] https://bilnaes.bandcamp.com/music 

Muqata’a: “Bilna’es means ‘in the negative.’ It’s an interdisciplinary platform, at least that’s how we see it. It was founded on the idea of mutual support and sharing of resources. A group of us, Palestinian artists, decided to start this, because we felt that a lot of the artists we know don’t have the resources that we’ve eventually managed to have access to. Simply because we’ve been doing this for a long time and we felt like we wanted to share these resources. We wanted to support artists from Palestine and beyond, and this whole idea came up at the beginning of the pandemic. A lot of the artists who are also our friends in our community, that we love, have really powerful work, yet they were about to stop doing their art because they couldn’t sustain themselves financially. The pandemic made everything even more difficult.  

So, that was the situation this idea came out of. We thought the best thing to do was to create this community, and to start sharing our resources to have this kind of support system and to push artists that haven’t released their work yet although they were about to. It was around the time our scene in Palestine was in the phase, things were about to happen. And then the pandemic hit. It was a really bad timing for our scene. We tried to get some of the artists from our scene to release their first albums. We tried to push them with different methods like PR, we’ve also done interactive web projects, publications of books, and installations with different artists. And we work in a way that refuses the status quo. We work in a way that’s anti-colonial in its essence, and it’s a collective effort. And that’s also part of the general idea of creating new narratives and facing what’s happening to us in new ways. Because what we’ve all been doing obviously is not working. It’s an attempt to go to new places and see things in different ways, find new economies for art, music and books – an attempt to create new methods for surviving, sustaining ourselves.” 

Working and Performing in Times of Extreme Violence

It’s truly a challenging time for anybody, but particularly for performing musicians, especially if they are from the affected regions. The physical threat and restriction of the global pandemic was one thing, but witnessing ongoing state violence of this extent in real time for this long is a whole new predicament. Many artists from Palestine or from nearby regions stopped performing or making music since the 7th of October 2023, and Muqata’a was one of them. While the horror is continuing and the situation on the ground is worsening day by day, many of them are coming back to express themselves. What were the difficulties they faced most, and how did they motivate themselves again? 

Muqata’a: “Mainly just not having enough time, capacity and energy to work on the performance. Due to everything that’s happening in Palestine, it’s quite difficult to set your mind to a project and work on it. We really pushed ourselves to do something during the residency. And the residency was actually very helpful for that because we were able to put some energy into making a performance. Generally, it’s extremely difficult to get anything done, you know. That’s the biggest challenge. You might get a bit of energy one day, and then you say ‘okay, tomorrow let’s meet up at this time and do this and that,’ and then the next day, you don’t feel the same way. 

It’s depression. There’s a heavy depression that’s looming on us, and it’s very difficult to be working during a genocide. I don’t even know if we’re meant to be working during a genocide. There are a lot of questions to be answered, but that’s one of the questions that are on our mind all the time: what are we expressing? What are we talking about? Should we be expressing ourselves? Is this the right time to be expressing yourself through art? And then, sometimes we feel like it is and sometimes we feel like it’s not. So, this back and forth and this roller coaster that our mind is in constantly makes it very difficult to create and very difficult to actually have a project that you can present.  

There’s less media coverage about it, but it’s still ongoing. The genocide is still ongoing. It’s escalating as well. But there’s less people talking about it. So, it’s even worse and scarier. It’s more depressing and it puts you in a more difficult place, but I kind of deliberately pushed myself to just see it as a technical thing and, like, practice. So, my relationship to music has changed. And the way I work with music now is like I’m rediscovering what music means, why I make music and what the purpose of it is. What is this piece of recorded sound going to do to this world? What does it even mean? All these questions that I’ve been asking myself throughout this whole time created this urgency for me to try to answer.  And that’s where I finally found myself accepting to perform again. 

To put me back in that challenging spot where it’s outside of my new comfort zone. It’s complicated. It’s a very layered way of dealing with how I feel towards music. So, I feel like I just put myself in this uncomfortable position so I can actually answer these questions. And I still haven’t answered them, and I’m still struggling to create and to produce, but I’m trying to interact with this process more. It took me a long time to get to this point, and I’m still in that process of trying to make sense of what I do. Make sense of my practice again. It’s been intense, a very intense process, because that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life since I was a kid. So, having to rethink about all of this is not an easy thing to do.” 

Finding Meanings and the Role of Music

I personally have been struggling to find meaning in holding a music festival or any other music events in the wake of massacres and massive destruction unfolding not only in Gaza but in different parts of the world, and there are often times you feel powerless and hopeless. Music can be a uniting force and overcome differences in times of peace, but it was proven it cannot in times of tremendous division. We are all experiencing something irreversible, but the impact of it is obviously far greater on artists from Palestine.  

Muqata’a: “I thought I understood why I do this, you know. I thought I understood my role and my position. But seeing everything you thought you knew crumbling at this speed and in this way… and I wouldn’t specifically characterize only Palestinians with this. I feel like a lot of people all around the world have lost the meaning to a lot of things. The systems that they thought made sense and were structured and layered in ways that you accepted as how everything is. But now, they are collapsing.  

Also, how I see music, how I see the musical community, the music scene globally, the idea of festivals, venues, and promoters… all that together have changed. The idea of who we depend on, and the idea of being Eurocentric with everything, and being part of a “global scene” – I feel like that all needs to be deconstructed and thought of in different ways, and seen through different lenses. 

And the way we’ve been seeing the world through a European lens all the time, that’s been shattered. That lens has been broken. And it’s time for a new language to emerge. It’s time for new ways of working, new collaborations, new connections across the world. So, in terms of where I place myself as an artist, and where I want to be, where I don’t want to be, who I would work with, who I don’t want to work with. So, not only musically and personally as I described earlier, but also in terms of more external engagements that require to be reestablished.” 

We’re still in the dark, in terms of finding where to go from here, but I wanted to know, after asking himself again all these crucial questions, how he sees the role of artists, and what music can do in times like this? 

Muqata’a: “Maybe I have answered that question indirectly already, because the way I see what music can do is what musicians can do, and where musicians can place themselves. How musicians can present themselves and represent what they believe in. By creating new collaborations and new ways of communication throughout the scenes, music can at least change their world. And changing their world can affect changing other worlds, other communities, because there is a global music community, right? That exists, and there are connections between them, and they are intertwined somehow, and they collaborate. 

So, what’s being built between those is very important. It could be built on powerful principles. It shouldn’t just be a sound and sonic conversation. It should be more than that. There should be politics, ethical values, and methods and ways of how things can be done differently. I don’t necessarily think that music itself can change the world. But musicians in their communities can show how things could look like on a small scale, this could create a nucleus of change. Because artists do inspire people in general. If people can see what artists are doing, this inspiration can be translated to other communities.”