“Dreaming of islands - whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter - is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone - or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew” (Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands)

Sadia Pineda Hameed’s mum came to the UK in the 1970s to work as a nurse and found community by joining a dance troupe, Lei Aloha, performing Filipino and Hawaiian music at cultural festivals across the UK. The troupe offered a space of kinship set against a backdrop of widespread discrimination and exclusion.

Starting with the songs of Lei Aloha, Sadia will explore the history of Filipino music, from pre-colonial folk traditions to the rise of Kundiman - a form of popular love ballad that emerged under Spanish colonial rule. Following this will delve into the history of U.S. occupation, and how the movement of soldiers and migrant workers across the Pacific saw the arrival of Hawaiian music, remaining popular amongst Filipino communities to this day. 

Throughout the evening, we will discuss karaoke - a national pastime in the Philippines - as a postcolonial strategy; how renditions allow us to hold both our own stories and the echoes of the past.

The conversation will be accompanied by projections, drawn from Sadia’s artworks and archives.

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Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer based in Wales. Her work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using 16mm film and hi8 video, sculptural installation, text and performance, her work imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like – often through the ‘handheld’.

Her practice is led by a process of cross-disciplinary semiotic, gestural and associative journeying in resistance to western processes of historicisation and displacement. Mythmaking, melodrama and decoy become playful devices to speak through a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge.

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