Past Residents Kamila Metwaly
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Photo by Christina Rizk
Kamila Metwaly, born in Warsaw 1984, is a music journalist, electronic musician and curator based between Berlin and Cairo. Metwaly founded an independent art and culture publication in Egypt, which specialized in music, arts and cultural writings from 2004 to 2009. Later, she worked in radio and the independent film scene, maintaining a strong presence in Cairo’s cultural and activist scenes for many years. Since 2014, Metwaly has specialized in music journalism for various independent Egyptian and Arab publications. In 2017, Metwaly joined SAVVY Contemporary and is currently curating an ongoing sound project titled Untraining the Ear: Listening Sessions. She has been involved with various sound based exhibition projects in the space, including What Has All This Got To Do With Coconuts And Rice: A Listening Exhibition on José Maceda, We have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, With, Towards, on Julius Eastman‘; and has co-curated a retrospective exhibition The Dog Done Gone Deaf: Exploring The Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Bonaventure Ndikung in the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal (2018). She has been appointed as a guest music researcher for the Donaueschingen New Music festival 2021 edition.
One of my focal points in the recent years has become the life and work of the pioneer of experimental electronic music: Halim El-Dabh (Egypt, 1921-2017) which has led me to explore the vast universe of undermined composers such as Eliane Radigue, Julius Eastman, Jose Maceda, and many more, and ultimately, defined my current interest in intersectional feminist sound histories, including listening to pioneer female and queer composers bodies of work. During this residency, I will focus on the electronic music archives (compositions from the years 1944, 1959, and 2016) of El-Dabh to re-map his contributions within the histories of electracoustic and electronic music. —Kamila