Youmna Saba

Youmna Saba, composer, sound artist and musician, explores resonances, sonic memories and languages through listening, musical composition and poetic speech.

Youmna Saba’s interest in resonance phenomena grew out of an intimate practice of listening, when she would spend hours pressing her ear against the body of her oud to pick up its finest harmonics, a gesture she compares to holding a seashell to one’s ear to hear the sea. This research continued at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, in her project La Réserve des Non-Dits, where she explored the resonances of silent instruments using miniature microphones. Through her recent projects (Wishah, 2023; Akwan, 2024; I Covered the Planet with a Dried Leaf, 2022), she is interested in the relationships between sound, matter, space and language, and in how acoustic and electromagnetic vibrations reveal invisible structures.

During her residency at Rocabella, she wishes to extend this research by approaching the Mediterranean and the surrounding site as a vast resonating body, traversed by acoustic, biological, geophysical and electromagnetic phenomena. Using hydrophones, contact microphones and electromagnetic receivers, she will collect different forms of vibration that will become the raw material of a process of poetic writing and composition. She sees poetry as an extension of listening, a way of translating into language the rhythms, silences, textures and resonances of the landscape. The sounds gathered may thus bring out images, word associations and forms of writing in which the musicality of language answers that of the environment.

She will also invite the artists in residence to interpret and transform these materials through their own practices, giving rise to exchanges between improvisation, composition, voice and poetry. Conceived as an open, collaborative laboratory, the residency will produce a series of poetic texts and sound compositions, both individual and collective, exploring the correspondences between vibration, memory, perception and language. She thus returns to her initial gesture: pressing her ear to the instrument and listening.