Ex Aqua is a live improvisational performance by theorist and poet Ayesha Hameed and musician Aimée Theriot. Their piece invites the audience into what Palestinian artist Bint Mbareh calls ‘aggressive listening’, exploring the concept of ‘exaqua’ – a term coined by poet M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong! to describe a watery equivalent of exhumation, or the act of reclaiming from the earth. Through poetry and sound, this reclamation process splinters and disperses, bearing witness to destruction on scales ranging from genocide to intimate grief and loss.
Working with voice, sound, and improvisation, Hameed and Theriot create a space in which fragments of language and sound surface, overlap, and dissolve. Hameed’s engagement with water, displacement, memory, and the legacies of slavery meets Theriot’s practice of treating sound as a vibrational and sculptural medium. Together, they explore listening as a way of attending to what has been submerged, dispersed, or lost, allowing grief and remembrance to emerge through the unstable materiality of sound.
Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 was a citywide arts manifestation taking place from 5 February to 29 March across 23 locations in Amsterdam. Titled Melted for Love, the programme was visited by more than 21.000 people and featured cutting-edge performances, contemporary sound experiments, and multidisciplinary art by over 200 international artists.
The Symposium, which took place at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 28 February and 1 March 2026, brought together performances and lectures by Yuk Hui, Flavia Dzodan, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Eleni Ikoniadou, Salomé Voegelin, Ayesha Hameed & Aimée Theriot, Margarida Mendes, Yazan Khalili, pantea, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Busher Kanj, Amr Mdah & Fabio Cervi, and ILYICH.
→ Continue reading about the Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 at 2026.sonicacts.com
This video is produced by Sonic Acts and realised as part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.
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