InterviewYou Tune Into Absence
Tara Al Dughaither works with voices, memory, and the gaps between them. At the Diriyah Biennale she told Ninyaz what an oral archive catches that a written one cannot, and why remembering needs silence to happen at all.
Watch the videoNinyaz opened by admitting that she and her guest had already got emotional before either of them reached the studio. A few times, in fact. That is a fair warning for a conversation about memory with someone who has spent years collecting it.
Tara Al Dughaither is a Saudi artist, curator and researcher who works between sound, memory and storytelling. Her subject is ancestral memory, and specifically the kind carried in voices rather than documents. She was in Riyadh for the Diriyah Biennale, with a panel that afternoon and a sonic essay to follow that weekend.
Ninyaz asked her the right question early. What can a voice carry that a traditional archive simply can’t?
Her answer was not the one you would expect from an archivist.
“When you’re actually in proximity, talking to people one-on-one, in the comfort and the context of their homes, or places that are neutral, and there are no expectations or results or consequences, one thing that stands out is forgetting, and absence. You tune into absence. And you realize that’s where the questions start forming, and the artistic imagination starts to actually fill in those voids.”
The gaps, in other words, are the material. Not the failure of it.
“Sometimes we think of absence and forgetting as a kind of, oh, I guess that wasn’t important, or maybe it’s something sensitive they don’t want to share. But actually people just are forgetting things, and it shows when they’re speaking.”
Research without a lab coat
The panel was called Working Through Fragments, and Al Dughaither was quick to place herself at the edge of it rather than the center, moderating two colleagues whose work she said genuinely challenges her.
What she wanted the room to take from it was a corrective about what memory work is, and what it isn’t.
“It’s not really through the lens of nostalgia, as is the trend in our day and age, but the lens of critical thinking.”
And a second corrective, about who gets to do it.
“Sometimes people hear research and they think boring and serious and you have to have a degree and all of that. But I really hope this conversation can inspire people to trust in their process, and believe that research is something you can do independently. And you can do it through asking honest, and sometimes difficult, sometimes confusing questions.”
Ninyaz picked that up and ran with it, pointing out that most of us were raised to think research means a lab and a chemist, when getting to know your own city, family or tribe is the same act by another name.
Why memory needs quiet
The part of the conversation with the sharpest edge was about attention, and it was not comfortable.
“The world is going so fast and we’re so overstimulated all the time with a lot of information. And the thing is that information, no matter how fun or addictive it can be, actually distorts the ability to remember. The brain doesn’t remember the same way.”
Which makes the practical work of an oral historian sound almost absurdly simple, and explains why it is hard.
“One thing that happens when you are engaging within an artistic framework, an oral historical framework, is as simple as making a safe and calm space to remember. Because memory doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to when there isn’t silence. There needs to be space to integrate, to reflect, to review, to question further, to imagine. And that’s really where repair happens.”
Then she turned it on the region, and on everyone in it, herself included.
“We’re very good at packaging memory and making it attractive, and really amazingly able to get people’s interest to even come to Saudi through that artistic lens. It’s amazing how many people are interested to come and visit. But when they arrive, and even when we arrive at each other’s spaces and each other’s company, are we able to actually listen to what we’re receiving?”
“You tune into absence. And that’s where the questions start forming.”
The story of women singing voices
The second thing she brought to the Biennale was a format she had never tried before: a sonic essay, or as she put it, a sonic offering.
It weaves her own voice as narrator and witness against recordings from Sawtasura, her archive dedicated to Saudi women’s voices. The project begins from a question most archives never think to ask.
“How do we even archive or remember a woman’s voice? Like, what does that even mean?”
The piece itself has a subject, and she stated it plainly.
“It’s telling the story of women singers who experienced the 80s and the 90s, and how that voice, where was it expressing itself, and what were some of the challenges of that time. It’s the story of women singing voices, and how they survived, before we’ve arrived to where we are now.”
It ran once, deliberately. She wanted to see whether the story landed before committing it to a cassette.
Her instruction to the audience was to lie down and shut their eyes.
“I hope that people can take a bit of time to experience something that is not necessarily there for entertainment, which is also amazing, but to really sink into what we try and strive to reach for, which is the truth.”
What she hoped they would feel
Ninyaz’s last question was what someone should expect to travel through with their eyes closed. Al Dughaither declined to prescribe it, then answered anyway.
“I don’t want to impose what people may or may not experience. I can say what I feel when I created it. What I feel is extremely empowered, and kind of guided, and seen, actually, and heard. So I hope that people feel that. That they don’t have to convolute their truth and who they are to fit any pre-image, or something that was created for them. That they can create their own story, and that their story does matter, even if it feels sometimes like nobody really wants to listen to it.”
Asked at the end for a message to other artists, she gave one line that works as a summary of everything before it.
“Dear artists, your process is sacred. Take it as seriously as you do your faith, because it is a gift from God. Celebrate your gift.”
For more conversations with the artists shaping culture across the Kingdom, tune in to MDLBEAST Radio on 104.8 Riyadh, 98.1 Jeddah, 97.4 Dammam and 87.6 Abha, or listen live at mdlbeastradio.com.
