Bread, Mykola Shpykovskyi, USSR, 1930 (film still)
Goodbye, Hartmut Geerken
written for JazzFest Berlin 2021
In the summer of 2017 I was searching for sounds for my film “Mapping Lessons” when I discovered the out of print album “Muharram 1392,” a free improvisation session recorded in Hartmut Geerken’s living room in Cairo in 1972. When I found that he was still practicing, I called him. He was excited to receive a call from Cairo, excited to talk about his work there almost 50 years earlier, and not surprisingly accepted the invitation to record an album with contemporary musicians from the region.
Hartmut believed in a spiritual realm that didn’t need explanations or a system of logic; he was open for encounters, for him there were no coincidences. So when a short time after arriving in Cairo in 1967 he ended up at a table at a reception with two musicians, one a jazz player, the other an aspiring one, it didn’t take long for the three to form a band together. It helped that Salah Ragab was also an army general at the command of Egypt’s military band.
Hartmut was an eclectic director of the Goethe institute in Cairo where he occasionally played alongside exiled Black Panther musicians - his “Music for Angela Davis” will be released later this year. But much of his time was devoted to helping Ragab’s soldier musicians unlearn their training in the European art of performing national anthems. Instead, he taught them the old skill of free improvisation, a practice that gets at the heart of the revolutionary movement that swept across Egypt and the region starting in 2011. It was also that year that Hartmut released “Muharram 1392.”
I only had the chance to get to know Hartmut in the last four years of his life. He was passionate, and full of energy, and acted nothing like his age. He loved talking about his encounters with Sun Ra and the Arkestra in Egypt, and the adventures of playing jazz under military rule. A liberatory way of being, a beautiful soul.
You were a bridge Hartmut, I miss you deeply.
OUT NOW:
a letter to the-survivors-of-the-old-time, Georgia, June 14 2022
On Trials: A Manual for the Theatre of Law / حاكمات قيد الفحص: دليل مسرح القانون
w/ Jasmina Metwaly. (Archive Books, released January 2022).
a publication accompanying “4 Stations of Autonomy” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022, w/ Linda Quiquivix, Vivien Sansour, Dirar Kalash, Walid, Yasser Munif & Omar Aziz (November 2022)
Corona is the virus, Capitalism is the pandemic, what do we do next? - An open letter to cultural institutions and practitioners of culture
in the Brooklyn Rail, March, 2021
CANTATA | CADENZA | CRESCENDO, POCO A POCO
in The Philistine by Basma al-Sharif, 2019
858: No Archive is Innocent: on the attempt of archiving revolt
In The Arab Archive –Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, the Institute of Network Cultures.
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Archives of the Commons III publication, Raina Sofia Museum (2022)
مفردات أسبوع فلسطيني , مجلة 28 سبتمبر 28, 2018
in Hundred Years of Now, Journal of the HKW, accompanying the project “Why are we here now?,” September 15 2017
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The catalogue of the Kyiv International Biennale, October 2017.
Standing with Syrians: An open letter to an anti-imperialist
in The Brooklyn Rail, 1 Feb. 2017
Fear the everyday state
in Emotional Architecture: No Fantasy without Protest, ed. Jenifer Evans, Nida Ghouse and Malak Helmy (Cairo: Emotional Architecture, 2015)
A Colonial Landscape
accompanying sound installation for the photography exhibition “A Colonial Landscape” by Tobias Zielony (Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria, November 2015)
2011 is not 1968: An open letter to an onlooker
in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Academic publications Africa and the Middle East" (IB Tauris, 2014)
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Cairo. Open City Catalogue (Ram Publications, 2014)
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Images of Transition - Perspectives on Visuality in Egypt 2011- 2013 (Columbia Press, 2013)