Where the Tirailleurs’ Stories are Heard

Listening Encounter with gongs from the Himalayan region and cymbals.

What happens to a song when it outlives the person who sings it? What does listening mean when history expresses itself through breathing, crackling, and loss? To what extent can sound serve as both an archive of violence and one of survival?

In this Listening Encounter, Nischal Khadka explores the experiences of Nepalese people who were recruited under British colonialism and forced into military training and wars that were not their own.

Thousands of them were interned in German prisoner-of-war camps during World War I, for example in Wünsdorf near Berlin. Yet their stories remain largely unknown in the city.

In colonial narratives, Nepalese recruits were referred to as “Gurkhas,” and a myth of a “warrior race” was constructed around them. Yet the term originally referred only to the Nepalese mountain region of Gorkha, from which many of them were recruited. During their captivity in German camps, they were subjected to another form of exploitation: researchers recorded their voices and languages as part of colonial ethnographic projects. Khadka follows Saidiya Hartman’s proposal to work with and against these collections of sound recordings. He views these archives as a contested space in which violence, as well as memory and survival, continue to resonate.

The Listening Encounter is based on a song by the Nepalese recruit Jas Bahadur Rai, who never returned from captivity. The piece was recorded in 1916 under prison conditions and is preserved today on a series of fragile wax cylinders. Through attentive listening and using contemporary field recordings from Wünsdorf, Khadka unfolds multi-layered stories and emotions to imagine possible escape routes for Bahadur Rai from the prison camp. Khadka relates the song to his own experiences as a Nepali who emigrated to Berlin, situates it within the tradition of Nepali folk music, and pays particular attention to the lyrics that evoke the landscape of Gorkha. In doing so, he facilitates a cross-generational sonic encounter and underscores the role of song as a space of anti-colonial belonging.

Mohamed-Ali Ltaief, I Hear the Old Sound of The World’s Future (2026)

Lecture-performance and listening experience

Lecture performance and listening experience highlight the connections between sound, poetry, and art history by encouraging a renewed engagement with early 20th-century sound recordings from North Africa. Mohamed-Ali Ltaief examines recordings that resist the colonial apparatus. He invites the audience to listen differently and to recognize how their sound continues to resonate today. The work draws on voice recordings of North African tirailleurs who were interned in German prisoner-of-war camps during World War I.

In this auditory act, Ltaief brings the poets and musicians of the tirailleurs into dialogue with cultural producers of that era, thereby crafting a modern art history that resists the epistemic violence of colonialism. The lecture performance features the voices of the Tunisian poets and singers Younes and Othmane (who were imprisoned in the Wünsdorf camp in Brandenburg) as well as the Somali poet Mohamed Nur (who was imprisoned in the Ruhleben camp in Berlin).

Access to the recordings was made possible thanks to the support and archival efforts of the Centre for Arab and Mediterranean Music at Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis, as well as the Berlin Phonogram Archive, the Sound Archive of Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) in France. They were also located through alternative archives, such as catalogs of independent music labels, including Oum-El-Hassen (Tunis, from the 1930s onward), Rsaïssi (Tunis, 1930s), Fiesta (Paris, 1940s), Macksoud (New York, 1910s–1930s), and Alamphon (USA, 1950s).

The lecture performance and the act of listening are part of Mohamed-Ali Ltaief’s exhibition and research project I Hear the Old Sound of The World’s Future (2026), developed by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in collaboration with Ibraaz in London and the Archipel Festival in Geneva.

PROGRAM

3:30–4:15 PM

Nischal Khadka, What Can a Song Do to You (2025–26)

4:15–5:00

Mohamed-Ali Ltaief, I Hear the Old Sound of The World’s Future (2026)

IN ENGLISH