We are artists, scholars, and community workers from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, the Institute of Social Work and the Department of Creative Arts at the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Across three gatherings in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Vienna (Austria), we explored how our surroundings are shaped by extractivism and dispossession, and how artistic practices can foster care, witnessing, mourning, and also an imagination of worlds beyond extraction.

Throughout the history of China, from early dynasties into contemporary times, aspects of poetry, painting, and writing have been grounded in varied but deeply connected ‘rules of rhythm’. These ‘rules’ permeate in diverse yet identifiable and recognizable forms. The research in this project is aimed at both adopting and adapting these rules of rhythm or rhythmic patterns in an experimental form that reimagines a tradition of ‘lyric aesthetics’ in the context of the contemporary interplay between sound, image, and writing.