Sonic Fossils
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| AL BORAQ or the lightning vehicle, wallnut ink on paper 42x 58cm |
Sonic Fossils
"What if Ibn Rushd’s* books could simply be sent online? What if borders and distances no longer mattered? What, really, is electricity?"
Sonic Fossils is an experimental research project exploring the intersection of sound and electricity in the Amazigh imaginative landscape. By working with feedback loops and raw electrical currents, it traces possible connections between cybernetics and Sufi thought from north Africa. If artificial intelligence is a legacy of Aristotelian logic, what would a Sufi machine sound like? What Sufi automatons? What virtual?
Working with sound, elements from Islamic esotericism, and decolonial critique, Sonic Fossils examines how electrification disrupted Indigenous sonic and spiritual practices, but seeing electricity as both a colonial force and a cosmic conduit.
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*Ibn Arabi recounts witnessing the body of Ibn Rushd being transported out of Marrakech in a coffin, balanced on one side of a donkey, with his books placed on the other side. The story can be interpreted as a allegory of the tension between rational philosophy and spiritual knowledge, reason, embodied in Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian works, is ultimately weighed against the transience of the human body. This episode is often cited as a reflection on the limits of pure rationalism in contrast to mystical insight. See Ibn Arabi, Kitab al-Muhadarat wa al-Muzakarat (The Book of Conversations and Remembrances), and Miguel Asín Palacios, El Islam cristianizado (1931), for further analysis of Ibn Arabi’s relationship with Ibn Rushd’s thought.
