Ahwak

video/audio, 2024

A piece exploring the shortcomings of translation, namely in the age of the digital. Abdel Halim Hafez’s Ahwak, a love song known by heart by perhaps every Arab for almost three generations, is transcribed in the Arabizi chat alphabet—the first stage of translational bastardization—and is sent to be read by a bot. Thus, the love is sapped. What remains is cold and empty—precisely what it feels like to translate an element of a culture so inherent to those within it.