Inside the Palestinian Sound Archive: preserving the audiovisual legacy of Palestine, one record at a time

Making your way through the vinyl and tape covers nestled within the Palestinian Sound Archive is quite breathtaking. The array of design and visual imagery on display is so vast. Intricate illustrations sit atop hazy airbrushed backgrounds, collaged photographs of instrument-holding musicians smile at you from the cover; while some have shots of beautiful beach scenes, with typography weaving around the covers’ edges. Bold colours are paired with soft palettes – some made even more delicate with age – and in one, the Palestinian flag is superimposed upon the body of a dove. This visual world reflects the music that sits within each of their sleeves and cases – varied and diverse – from folk to jazz, soul and funk, spanning as far back as a century ago to today, and encompassing the many stories and histories that lie behind each and every song.

The archive has been lovingly and steadfastly compiled by Mo’min Swaitat and is a branch of his record label, the Majazz Project, which releases Palestinian music, past and present – such as collections of revolutionary anthems, and Black Panther mixtapes – and also connects with past musical artists, to give their work relevant context for new audiences. Mo’min is an actor and artist from Jenin, a city in the West Bank. Jenin is home to the famous Freedom Theatre, a theatre company started by the political and human rights activist Arna Mer Khamis during the First Intifada, to provide theatre and drama activities to children as a means of dealing with life under occupation and as a form of cultural resistance, still a centre focus of its work today.

Mo’min trained with Juliano Mer Khamis, Arna’s son – an actor and key figure in the theatre – who was assassinated outside the theatre on 4 April 2011. “I first came to London after he had been killed, to continue the legacy he had passed onto us and to study the method of mime and physical theatre,” says Mo’min. “Since then, my life has gone in a lot of different, unexpected directions.” In February of 2020 he returned to Palestine to start a documentary project about Juliano, but then, when the pandemic started, borders closed and Mo’min could no longer return home. “I didn’t know it then,” says Mo’min, “but at the end of lockdown, after spending nine months in my family home, I’d become an archivist.”

While Mo’min had been a collecting prior to the pandemic, it was the space for reflection on how music had informed his life that pushed him to take it more seriously. Mo’min is Palestinian Bedouin – a minority within Palestine that has a rich musical legacy – and he comes from a long line of musicians and singers. One of the Majazz label’s releases, the Palestinian Bedouin Mixtape, is a collection of his family’s music. What’s more, Mo’min returned to locations that had informed and influenced his love of music. “I started thinking about Tariq, who used to own a cassette shop I’d visited as a kid in Jenin refugee camp, where my mum’s family lived,” he says. “I wondered whether he was still around and, if so, whether he still had any tapes.” Mo’min later found his shop shuttered up, but later tracked him down. Tariq took Mo’min back to the shop to see his collection, now covered in dust – no one had shown interest for a long time. “I knew I’d found something really special,” says Mo’min. “Lots of albums were soundtracks of the First and Second Intifadas – the uprisings which had shaped (still shapes) our lives as Palestinians.”

After this meeting with Tariq, Mo’min’s collecting accelerated, he began attending numerous junk shops and secondhand markets in the West Bank, and spent “months and months” listening to his discoveries. “A lot of people thought it was funny but I knew these materials needed preserving,” says Mo’min. “Zionism has attempted to destroy our cultural identity, arresting and killing artists and preventing us from accessing our music, cinema, photography, painting and more.” Something that stood out to Mo’min, was the quality of the music he was encountering. “One thing about living under military colonial settler state is that there has been this urgency about communicating our struggle, our lives, our dreams and hopes, our pain and our joy, our loves and losses, through music and spoken word, through weddings and funerals,” and, he continues, “that’s kind of prevented a lot of trashy pop culture stuff from being released! We have had to think carefully about the messages we communicate. Every word, every note matters.”

Through this process, Mo’min has developed a few stylistic elements of covers that he’s particularly fond of – especially ones that offer subtle clues into the type of music – like when he comes across a cover with flowers on it. These, he tells us, are usually field recordings from Palestine, Syria and Iraq, unofficial releases which often result in a “raw”, and unique sound. “They’re one-offs that you can’t find elsewhere,” says Mo’min, “and the flower is the clue!” Others, he’s drawn to for their lasting iconography, like an Al Fajer album, which shows “a boy, alone with stones in his hand, standing off against the colonial army”. Or, the cover of a Farkit al Tareeq tape which features a young boy wearing a kuffiyeh – an image Mo’min always finds himself returning to.

The archive is currently on exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre. Together with Helena Aðalsteinsdóttir, curatorial assistant at the Southbank Centre, Mo’min co-curated a selection of music from the 1960s-2000s, including Palestinian Bedouin music, Islamic poetry, and revolutionary music. A number of album covers and tapes are also on display, alongside some of the stories of how they were made and distributed during the first and second Intifadas. While Mo’min has held listening sessions and workshops all over the world, this is the first exhibition, in the “traditional sense of the word”, and the first showing in London. “It’s been wonderful, especially during such a horrifying and painful time for us as a community, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank,” says Mo’min. “Nothing is normal for us, and it’s impossible to pretend that it is. But we find moments of hope, joy and inspiration.”

Eventually, Mo’min has hopes of expanding the archive, both on a global and local scale. He wants to create a digital archive which will be available to the Palestinian diaspora, and anyone else interested in Palestinian musical heritage. Mo’min also has dreams of having a physical space in Palestine, ideally his home of Jenin where the local community – especially younger people – can engage with their shared cultural history, giving them the chance to listen to music from decades ago, and make their own sounds and music. Importantly, the Majazz Project is not just about preserving the past, but about looking to the future too. “There’s still so much archival sound in camps, towns, villages and cities in the West Bank that is at risk. Just think how much cultural heritage has been destroyed in Gaza during this genocide,” says Mo’min. “But eventually, all of it has to come home. That’s the ultimate aim – for my own community to regain hope of return, for us, and our material culture.”

Majazz Project: Palestinian Sound Archive exhibition is running at the Southbank Centre, Royal Festival Hall until 1 November.