Tarek Atoui transforms AlUla's rocks to music with the help of the local community

Lebanese artist's exhibition at AlUla Arts Festival will serve as a starting point to a three-year-long project for the city's contemporary art museum

Tarek Atoui has spent the past decade developing several unique musical instruments that make use of organic materials. Photo: Royal Commission for AlUla

When people gathered at the AlJadidah district on Thursday evening for the opening performance of the AlUla Arts Festival, most had no idea what to expect.

The musical performance was obviously not going to be a conventional one. The carpeted stage was decked with stones, branches and peculiar electrical contraptions. A stone basin was set in the centre of the stage, filled with water and fitted with microphones. A table in the corner of the platform bore tiles of multicoloured fabrics that seemed straight out of a tailor’s collection of swatches.

In fact, the only objects on stage that hinted the performance would be a musical one was a table with a mixing board and synthesiser, as well as a sparse drum set, merely including a floor tom and a ride cymbal.

Those familiar with Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui’s oeuvre know his penchant for coaxing musicality from unlikely sources and collaborations, and his performance at AlUla Arts Festival was no different, serving as an opener both to the event, as well as his featured exhibition: Bayt Al-Hams, or The Whispering House in Arabic.

Performing alongside renowned French percussionist Toma Gouband, as well as students from music schools in AlUla, Atoui at once challenged formal concepts of music, while also evoking an appreciation of nature’s melodiousness.

The trickling sound of water, amplified and widened by reverb, kicked off the performance, and was soon accompanied by the sounds of tapping stones. Atoui, meanwhile, hunched over a synthesiser, which he says was the “first instrument I invented many years ago”, gesturing at its infrared sensors to generate sound. From the close distance, the tum and thud of frame drums were herd as students began slowly approaching the stage.

The rhythm was a sombre one, bringing to mind ancient rituals of burial and war. The performance, however, was not confined to this severity, capering towards more jovial ranges, as students began using other instruments that Atoui invented, including a pad coated with conductive ink and used to generate a deep, resonate bass. A concert of natural and synthesised timbres, the opening show underscored the relationship between humans and sound, as well as the primeval foundations of music.

The students, Atoui says, are all being trained as classical musicians, who at first may have been taken aback by his abstract philosophies of music. For the performance, they had to set aside everything they had studied about the formal structures of music, breaking free from scales, keys and time signatures.

“The students came from two different schools,” he says. “They were boys and girls from 10 to 12 years old. It was super, super nice working with them, because a subject like this can be quite abstract. They just recently started to learn classical music and traditional instruments. It was liberating, because all of a sudden, like, anything could become music. They were happy that they could improvise, that they didn’t need to read off a sheet and stick to a score. For the kids, it was very playful and fun.”

However, Atoui says despite the free form, there was one cardinal rule that he had set during the workshop sessions he held with the students. “There was only one mistake that you could do, which is not listen to the others,” he says.

Running until April 19, Atoui’s exhibition at AlUla Arts Festival gives visitors a chance to try their own hand at his instruments. One contraption features a chains dangling from a gyrating mechanism towards a cymbal. Through headphones, visitors can hear the nuances of how the brass resonates to the chain as well as to the human touch. Another installation offers the opportunity to try the conductive ink pad, using the body’s electricity to synthesise bass notes. Felt pads, meanwhile, generate sound based on the amount of pressure inflicted against them. The stone basin is also featured in the exhibition.

The instruments, Atoui says, were developed across the past decade, and will serve “as a starting point” to his long-term project at AlUla. The project, Al Ghasaq - The Dusk, builds upon Atoui’s musical ethos, fusing traditional and contemporary approaches to sound, performance and craftsmanship in AlUla. Al Ghasaq will culminate with an installation and composition that Atoui will create specifically for the collection of AlUla’s contemporary art museum.

Bayt Al Hams is a suggestion of what is to come, but more than that “it is an invitation to listen".

“In the sense that it's a generative work, you can spend a lot of time in it, and things are changing all the time and constantly shifting,” he says.

Atoui says that while he brought his own instruments, as well as organic materials such as stones from his collection in France, a large share of the materials used for the performance and the exhibition were locally sourced.

“I invited Toma, who has a sensibility towards this type of material and works with stones, branches and different organic materials, to go on walks in the valleys here and collect a bunch of stones that we used,” he says.

Atoui says he is looking towards developing a relationship with AlUla over the next three years, and is excited to see how the project will reflect on his experiences. His visits to the surrounding landscapes, he says, were “humbling".

“There's a deep respect to this past and there's a deep acknowledgement to it,” he says. “What I'm also interested in is the place in the present and the people of the place you see.”

The stones, branches and organic materials from the landscape were pivotal to the performance and Bayt Al Hams, but more than that, Atoui says he was excited to kick off his time in AlUla with a collaboration with the local community. “The minerality of the place came into play, of course, but it was really about making the people and the human being central.”