Bint Mbareh, one of our residents during 2024, presents The Not My Problem podcast.

The Not My Problem podcast is not a traditional advice column. It openly states that it cares equally about the world and the advice-seeker: in other words, it does not care enough about the advice-seeker, so gives necessary wisdom but completely irrelevant advice. The advice given in this episode follows the life of a photographer and image editor called "Separated By A Screen" or SEPARATED, for short. The photographer falls in love with the subjects of her images, refuses real-life romance with real-life people, becomes emaciated with hyperfixation and obsession and fantasy as she looks through the details of each of the images, does not confide her love in any of the clients she works with, then proceeds to fall completely out of love when she meets them again in the flesh. She seeks advice for this condition, which prevents her from finding lasting connection.

Unfortunately, she seeks advice from the wrong podcast. The advice is offered in the form of resources from Margarida Mendes, Fred Moten, and Federico Campagna, with a short interlude from Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian political prisoner who was killed in Israeli prisons due to intentional medical negligence in May 2024 after over three decades in prison. Listen and learn, as almost no serious advice is given, but much serious elaboration and many recipes, sonic experiments and incantations take place.

Read more about the piece here.

Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between water waves and sound waves leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice and by sounding communally – similarly to being enveloped by a water body. She challenges settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to political revolution.