BaTn بــــــــــطـن - House of Light is a musical and audiovisual performance narrating Hoda Siahtiri’s descent into the abyss of loss – a story of facing your wounds and encountering the monsters residing there, channeling their pain in order to set them free. Journeying through song, music, archival images, and ancestral sounds, the audience is invited to inhabit the magical space between silence and voice, ultimately finding a way towards the light of remembrance and collectivity.
Storytelling unfolds through sound, language, and movement within an enveloping, womb-like environment. Farsi, Bakhtiari, and English texts flow together — sometimes conveying meaning, sometimes dissolving into melody and tone — creating a landscape of listening where voice and silence coexist.
Thematically, BaTn ـطـن ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ بـ - House of Light reflects on how modern and patriarchal histories have inscribed trauma onto the body, particularly the female and displaced body. It revisits the impacts of colonial and imperial modernity on women, nature, and voice, proposing how we might be able to let them go by reclaiming grief as a site of knowledge and regeneration.
SYNOPSIS
Rooted in Siahtiri’s longstanding research Singing the Silences, the performance explores how personal grief echoes collective and intergenerational pain. Accompanied on stage by composer and musician Guillaume Soufrice, Siahtiri sings her way through an embodied archive of image and song material ranging from Iranian pop songs from the fifties, to the ancient ancestral songs of Bakhtiari women from the Zagros mountains, to slivers of sonic encounters from the present. Storytelling slides continually into singing: a collective ceremony carried by Siahtiri’s voice. Taking on the circular form of Naghali and Taazieh (ancient Iranian theatrical forms), Siahtiri sets up a womb-like environment with rolls of textile that also serve as a multi-layered projection screen. Unravelling the scrolls, images appear and disappear, superposing a layer of found archival footage from the 1953 coup d’état in Iran blended with personal photos.
By intertwining archival fabric with contemporary composition and soundscapes (created by Guillaume Soufrice), an immersive, sensorial space emerges that holds both silence and voice: audience and performers alike partake in an affective journey of remembrance and rebirth.
As Hoda describes: “My storytelling practice is sensorial and embodied. I constantly move in-between oppositions; voice and silence, peace and violence, individual and collective. Through resonance, I listen to what has been silenced — in myself, in my lineage, and in the world. Each performance becomes a ceremony of holding that in-between space — to me, this is an act of healing through voice.”
BaTn ـطـن ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ ـ بـ - House of Light invites audiences to listen beyond language, to the sonic and emotional layers of silence, loss, and transformation, witnessing how ancestral voices and rituals can offer ways of sensing, caring, and remembering.
