Happy New Fear
Multimedia performance
“Rima is an artist working on the intersection between performance, audio and choreography. Her piece for CTM Radiolab will be an audio re-staging of her controversial Beirut walk – a sounding of the politics of fear – which captured the jury’s imagination” comments jury member Anne Hilde Neset
Taking off from Madame Bomba: The TNT project, “Happy New Fear” is a multi media performance that blends elements of experimental music, sound art, visual projections and live radio drama as it follows Madame Bomba and her search for her lover in the city, a stranger who exists in the collective consciousness and of whom everyone is afraid of.
Using audiovisual material sourced directly from Beirut, Najdi maps out Bomba’s walks, her negotiation of her own fear of walking as a breathing bomb. The work aims to explore the feeling of being alone, inadequate, and to confront the illusion of having control over one’s fear. The story reflects how violence is not only direct, explosive and spectacular, but structural, gradual and anonymous, targeting everyone.
Together with musician Kathy Alberici and visual artist Ana Nieves Moya, Najdi aims to explore the environment of emotions, their multiplicity, their uncertainty, and the contradictory nature of their temporality.
Click here for the radio version broadcasted on Deutschlandradio Kultur Radio
Review // Berlin Art Link CTM
Created by Rima Najdi
Visuals by Ana Nieves Moya
Music by Kathy Alberici
Happy New Fear premiered on February 4, 2017, at Hebbel am Uffer / HAU2 , as a commissioned work by CTM 2017 Radio Lab. Awarded by Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst and CTM Festival, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and the SoCCoS – the Sound of Culture, the Culture of Sound initiative, the CTM 2017 Radio Lab Open Call for works sought unusual ideas for pairing the specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation, that also explore the CTM 2017 Festival theme: Fear Anger Love.
Happy New Fear was developed, in part, at the 2016 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in MENA with additional Post-Lab Support funds made possible from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.