Fatima Lahham
I’m a musician and researcher based in London, UK. My work focusses on improvisation, community music-making, health/healing justice, and creative and participatory ways of doing research.
One week in Mijakovići, making sounding and singing toolkits for community use. The residency carries one strand of her research at the University of Manchester.
Concept
This residency will allow me to work on one important strand from my current music and research project at the University of Manchester. My project centres the role of community music and sound making practices in healing justice strategies, working particularly with Muslim and global majority communities and organisations.
The project is practice-based, creative, and participatory, and on this residency, I would like to create sounding and singing toolkits for community use. These toolkits will take the form of both physical and online resources, designed to support people to sing and make sounds together through prompts and practical exercises that I have been developing in my work so far.
The toolkits will incorporate my writing, alongside QR codes linking to recordings of music to listen to, which I will record using my voice and piano. During the residency, I will create artworks for the toolkits, as well as spending some time making field recordings, improvising, and making recordings using my voice, recorders, and piano.
The resulting toolkits will be printed and available for the local community in Mijakovići, as well as being disseminated in London and Manchester where I work. They will also be available for free online in digital formats.
Practice
I am a recorder player and vocalist, and the work closest to my heart is improvisation-based. My practice takes inspiration from baroque music, Arabic music, birdsong, poetry and the sound of the sea. I enjoy exploring a wide range of improvisation-based practice both solo and with collaborators, and performed in the UK at venues such as Cafe Oto, the Wigmore Hall, and the London Handel Festival, and in France, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany. My solo album bulbul (FS Records, 2022), draws on improvisation and poetry to tell stories about birds, voices, home, and the spaces in between. My first book, Improvising Otherwise was published open access in April 2025 by Open Book Publishers.
I am currently working on my research project: ‘Carrying Each Others’ Hearts with Our Ears’, funded through a Hallsworth Fellowship in Geography (2025-2028) at the University of Manchester. The project builds on my research residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (2024-2025), where I led the project, ‘Sawt al-Shifaa’ about Muslim experiences of sound, music and healing. […] My current work draws on my practice as a facilitator to create spaces for people to sound and sing, and I have recently worked with the Kiln theatre in Kilburn, the Crafts Council as part of a project with the Arab-British centre, the Feminist Library in Peckham, and the charity Women for Refugee Women. I have also worked as a hospital musician at several hospitals including as Musician in Residence at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and at hospitals in Cairo, Egypt.
Selected work
External
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