Ashes, Teeth, and Water is a multi-disciplinary artistic project that interrogates the cultural, political, and historical conditions of migrant memory in contemporary Europe. The work spans composition, performance, moving image, sculpture, and digital technology, and is informed by the theoretical framework of embodied re-relationality. This concept situates art-making as a process of reconnecting bodies, histories, and environments disrupted by displacement and colonial modernity.

The project draws on the sonic and cultural practices of late 1980s Rudeboy culture in the United Kingdom—a diasporic form foundational to subsequent electronic music movements. By situating this culture within a broader constellation of post-Western aesthetics, ethnographic archives, and modes of resistance, Ashes, Teeth, and Water positions sound as a vehicle for both historical critique and speculative re-imagination.

The structure of the project follows a tripartite rhythm that binds together the immaterial, the material, and the human: sound as the principle of the unseen, built form as the grounding of space, and communal gathering as the enactment of relation. This balance offers not only a dramaturgical framework but also a cosmological one, where harmony depends on the interplay between elements rather than on domination by any single order.

The elemental imagery is central. Water, in particular, functions as archive, carrier, and medium of renewal—capable of both dissolving and shaping form. In Transmutation, ceramic vessels filled with water are vibrated by sonic motifs, producing resonances that enact a process of refinement. Here the project approaches alchemy: rage and inheritance are distilled into memory, and memory into collective communion. The vessel becomes a site where sound and matter converge to render transformation perceptible.

Through these methods, Ashes, Teeth, and Water contributes to ongoing debates in performance studies, diaspora studies, and sound studies. It extends traditions of Black Atlantic thought while engaging other global lineages that emphasize balance, elemental relation, and transformation across time. Ultimately, the work proposes that artistic practice can function as a living archive, transmuting inherited violence into memory and opening space for new forms of relational cosmology beyond Western paradigms.

This response actively considers historically successful forms of resistance to authoritarianism, oligarchic infiltration and genocide washing whilst simultaneously embracing modernity . It does so by employing a symbolic atemporal and non geospatial approach to congregation that lies outside of commodified broadcast, commercial distribution or reproduction.

Phase One -Congregation

From Queens and Hooliganz (a high tech spatialised sound performance ), to Tomb of the Sophists (a collision of structure and congregation ), to Swim Team Cypher (a cathartic gathering of bodies in local rhythm), the first 3 part public phase of the project will take place across September 2025.

By challenging at a compositional level the perception of place, value, state violence and normalised xenophobia the work charts a passage of a central performer as “antagonist” through grief, confrontation, and survival.

PART I : FUNKHAUS | BERLIN | 13/09/25 | SPATIAL

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Phase 2 - Transmutation

The closing large scale industrial installation set for late 2025 Transmutation Vessels, recombines these earlier acts: suspended ceramic vessels of water are vibrated by ultrasonic motifs, their resonances processed and spatialised, sonically activating film and graphical fragments from each of the phase one performances.

The resulting materials will form a basis for ongoing A/V & DJ shows aimed at re-imbuing the global underground with soundsystem DNA