Haytham el-Wardany

In the Saari Residence, I would like to work on my project Stones in My Ear. It’s a prose book that explores the practice of lending and borrowing voices as a form of solidarity. I’m particularly interested in the intertwined themes of migration, diaspora, and inheriting emancipatory traditions. Central to my inquiry is the exploration of poetic images as a medium where the boundary between historical fact and poetic imagination become permeable and blurred. 

Black thought and expression serve as crucial inspiration for my project, particularly in their emphasis on listening and sounding as fundamental political modes of being and resistance.

I hope to find the focused environment necessary to review and refine the existing fragments of my manuscript, allowing me to re-approach the work with renewed clarity away from the usual distractions of city life. I am also deeply curious about the generative power of the residency’s natural surroundings. I am intrigued by how the specific landscape of Saari and its layered history might subtly influence my writing. Beyond this, I look forward to encounters with my peers—fellow artists and writers—hoping to learn from their practices and find inspiration in the exchange of ideas.

Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator, living and working in Berlin. He spent the last year listening to talking animals, in fables and elsewhere, and learned from them how to speak in moments of danger. His latest book, Jackals and The Missing Letters (Al-Karma 2023), considers forgotten expressions of hope within Arabic fables, where animals speak and humans listen, in a moment of post “Arab Spring” speechlessness. In previous publications, including The Book of Sleep and How to Disappear, el-Wardany has examined the potential of passivity, through regimes of listening and the dialectics of sleep and vigilance. He is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism 2022/2023.