SOLVE ET COAGULA → عيب, Stage I: تسويد (The Blackening), 2023
Sound and ritual performance (video, harmonium, pedals, cassette tape, movement)
Running time: 39 minutes, 28 seconds
MITU580, Gowanus, NY, USA
Presented by ISSUE Project Room
March 10, 2023

ABOUT THE SERIES

Throughout 2023, BINT has been collecting anonymous experiences of shame from the SWANA diaspora. These submissions form the raw material of her year-long residency titled, عيب:SOLVE ET COAGULA, which unfolds over three performances corresponding to the Arabic alchemical stages of transmutation. Each program was an audiovisual, immersive sound ritual loosely structured after Sufi sem‘a gatherings — spaces historically created for collective listening, chanting, and rhythmic devotion, often hidden from orthodox authorities. 

STAGE I: THE BLACKENING تسويد

This first performance embodies nigredo — the burning away, the rot and char that must come before regeneration. In this work, the audience was invited to collectively confront the weight of exile, alienation, and shame.

The submitted stories were transformed into noise through software that converts text into abrasive sonic textures. These were recorded to cassette, overlaid with prayers for protection and soothing on a four-track, and then re-introduced into the space as the performance’s core sound source. Through live manipulation of harmonium, voice, field recordings, drone, and synthesizers, BINT layered and fractured these sounds, heightening their visceral intensity.

At the climax of the piece, the cassette tapes themselves — physical vessels of the stories — were ritualistically shredded and melted, a symbolic act of burning the dross. Projections, lighting, color, and scent expanded the soundscape into a full-body experience, immersing participants in a dissonant, cathartic passage through nigredo — where pain was collectively aired, ruptured, and transmuted.

All still photography by Cameron Kelly McLeod.