SOU|TH, initiated by the SOU Initiative in partnership with the Sharjah Arts Foundation (Music Department), is a transnational sound and music residency exploring how knowledge and artistic practice move across the global majority and its diasporas. It proposes a decentralised model of exchange grounded in movement, encounter, and transformation.
Over the course of five weeks, the residency unfolds as a sequential relay across five locations: Thailand, Egypt, Vietnam, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.
Each participant takes part in three moments – becoming both the host and the guest of the residency by hosting an incoming artist and traveling onward – becoming both a receiver and a transmitter of knowledge, experience, and context.
The program begins in Thailand, where a sound artist and/or musician travels from Egypt for a seven-day period of research and exchange with a Thai practitioner. Following this encounter, the Egyptian participant returns home, while the Thai participant continues on to Tunis to work with a new local artist. The relay then moves from Tunis to Hanoi. In the final exchange, the Vietnamese participant travels to Cairo, completing the cycle. This closed loop is intentional: it refuses one-way models of cultural mobility and ensures that each artist participates fully as both host and guest, foregrounding reciprocity over extraction. This cycle is repeated twice with a different set of countries for the second cycle, once in April-May and a subsequent period in November-December 2026.
The residency culminates in a collective gathering in Sharjah in December 2026, where all eight participants from both cycles come together to reflect on their individual trajectories and shared experiences. Sharjah offers a critical meeting point for these reflections – a space to draw out common threads across practices shaped in different contexts. The gathering may take the form of listening sessions, conversations, or performative encounters, supported by Sharjah’s capacity to facilitate documentation, publishing, and the creation of shared records. The emphasis remains on dialogue and reflection rather than the presentation of finished works.
There is no fixed distinction between host and guest. Each encounter unfolds through mutual transmission, relational time, and embodied practice. Interruptions in communication – moments of misalignment, misunderstanding, or loss – are treated as productive traces, revealing how knowledge shifts as it moves across borders, languages, and cultural frameworks.
More about the residency.
Across the global majority and its diasporas, rich histories of resistance, care, and collective knowledge have often unfolded outside dominant cultural narratives. As difference is increasingly simplified or fixed, SOU|TH offers space to share decolonial experiences, build solidarities, and imagine artistic futures together. The residency is guided by the metaphor of a broken telephone. Knowledge, sound, gestures, and stories move from one context to another, shifting as they travel. Misunderstandings and gaps are not treated as problems to resolve, but as meaningful moments where new ideas and connections can emerge. This approach challenges hierarchical models of authorship and expertise. Rather than centering a single voice or point of origin, knowledge is understood as collective, relational, and shaped by lived experience. The residency foregrounds ways of knowing that have long been sidelined – feminine, matriarchal, and plural – not as acts of inclusion, but as foundational. SOU|TH engages with cultural forms that do not stem from a single root, but from accumulated encounters shaped by memory, ritual, improvisation, and survival. Such entanglements are frequently flattened into stable identities or subsumed within dominant narratives of nation and culture. The residency remains attentive to these complexities, not to recover an original truth, but to allow cultural knowledge to persist as plural, contingent, and unresolved.