JAWAP
Thania Petersen
This installation is on show at BAK Basecamp
In JAWAP, Thania Petersen traces the migration of Sufi music across the Indian Ocean, approaching sound as archive, prophecy, and liberation technology. What began as an attempt to map historical routes—linking the Cape to Asia and back to Africa—evolves into a radical reorientation of time itself. Through deep listening to and with Sufi communities, Petersen comes to understand dhikr (remembrance) not as a return to the past, but as a call from the future.
The work imagines sonic practice as a living system that transcends borders and linear chronology. Repetition becomes frequency; chant becomes code. In this sense, dhikr operates as a technology—one that unlocks memory not as nostalgia, but as activation. It is a rhythm that dismantles fear and restores communal alignment, reminding us who we are beneath imposed identities and colonial fractures.
Petersen’s practice, rooted in her Afro-Asian Creole heritage and Sufi traditions, proposes that liberation is not inherited but remembered. Children, imagined as custodians of time, embody a future already watching us. Within this circular temporality, sound becomes both vessel and guide—an ancestral intelligence arriving from what is yet to come, inviting us into another way of being.