Shareeka Helaluddin

Shareeka Helaluddin is an experimental artist, radio producer and queer-community facilitator; currently working on unceded Gadigal Country. Creating under the pseudonym akka, her sound practice explores temporality, drone, dissonance, memory, ritual and a pursuit of deeper listening. Her work is often grounded in notions of healing and reciprocity, attempting to use soundscapes as a place to find connection and spaciousness.

Having recently begun her studies into therapy, she hopes to move towards a healing practice that explores somatics, care and sonic expression as a means of liberation for communities who have been maligned by dominant and problematic structures of mental health. By coalescing creativity and therapy, she also hopes to decentre institutionally-bound art to more sustainable, community-orientated pursuits.

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Shareeka Helaluddin, recitation in four dimensions, ways of attuning, 2022

text and sound
For Conductive Site.

It is recommended to watch the full version of Animate Loading: 1 before experiencing this work, taking your time with this piece and don’t feel pressure to read it from start to finish. 

Content Note

This piece alludes to the artist’s experience with disassociation.

Artist reference image, Riana Head-Toussaint, Animate Loading: 1 (video still), 2022

1

“Night time, bats fly across darkening sky”

1.i

I try to drop in from my thinking self to my feeling self. I notice all the sensations that live in this body. I imagine my head guided upwards, taking a full breath and expanding into the heavens. If this is to be the plane of dignity, what is the respect that we show to ourselves and each other? 

1.ii

I often think about how my first relationship to sound was hearing an adhan or a bhajan - vocalisations that try to bring one closer to god/s. I look up feigning reverence, but mostly because I feel anxious being around bodies, here. Often I don’t realise that I am here, so I find salvation in knowing that looking up at the darkening sky is looking at a different point in time. There is something ineffable, spiritual and ambiguous about sound that I find solace in, but perhaps I am also intimidated when I am asked what I really mean and what I really want. I look up again, and spell god’s name with my tongue. 

Play or experience below

[Warm washes of breathy but melodic tones emit as though pushed through hollow pipes, expanded and released. Glimmer-like rhythms begin but are uneven, like a piece of flimsy metal being whirred quickly and then let go. A voice emerges, then in chorus. Slowly. They are detuned and layered with each other, dissolving into the other tones. Occasionally, coming up for air from the awash of increasingly dense sounds. The tones of the voices are contemplative, searching for clarity but remain unresolved. The sounds increase in depth, a storm brews and finally bursts, waning as quickly as it came. A voice remains alone, in solitude, then leaves. Left, is the faint glow of the rhythms, once let go now trying to be pulled back] 

/

2

“The collective of bodies move like ants”

2.i

I expand my sense of self from side to side, taking up more space. I notice how I have been made to fold into a shape that is not really mine, so I try to be led by intuition and not by shame. I take a moment to unfurl and outstretch into a fuller version of myself, settling into my own width whilst noticing the collective of bodies and the legacies that surround me. If this is to be the plane of connection, how do we know what we are willing to give and to receive?

2.ii

Silence is inseparable to sound, in a symbiotic relationship. Silence can be just as textured, mutable and political; and a measure of the distance between each other. I hold out my arms from side to side, challenging the bounds of my own expectations. My palms face up and make a cup, fingers are stretched but not too splayed. This form is a mudras called padmakosha and can signify a wood-apple, a lotus, a bell, a womb, a vessel, to eat, to worship, a cluster of flowers, or an ant hill. I like how this one form can be as generous as it is receptive. 

Play or experience below

[a body breathes, calmly. Resonant tones form a concave shape, carved like a vessel of offerings or ready to receive. Faintly, there are echoes that move around aimlessly, eventually fading and finding new homes. This piece can be described as sparse or abundant, depending on what you feel] 

/

3

“My hands connect with asphalt”

3.i

I notice gravity helping tether me to the earth. I breathe in and out and soften into the pull. I offer a sentiment that resonates to the people who have tended to this place, and honour the bodies that have moved across geographies so I can be here. 

3.ii

Language can feel jagged and confining, like running your hand across asphalt and feeling the tingle and heat of unwelcome and abrasion. Ksssssk, ksssssk. Ow! I often feel unable to explain myself and have retreated to creating works that are fluid and veiled, but it still confuses people no matter how intimately we know each other.  In studies of the ecology of sound ‘geophany’ is a word given to describe sounds that occur in any habitat. Like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean, or the movement of the earth. A field recording describes the capture of these natural sounds. How quick we are to claim the sounds of a land without permission. 

3.iii

Feel, notice and take note of everything that is around you; with gratitude and without ownership [no time, as needed]

/

4

“Bodies curl around each other, mirroring movement”

4.i

I begin to settle into my depths, uncurling my body and feeling for the back. I breathe in and out through the expanse and remember everything I have moved through, survived. I remember all the people and things I have found support in, the skills I have learned and the ancestry I am connected to. I mirror the movement towards the front. I breathe in thinking what is going to come, releasing into the unknown and dreaming about the things we can build together. If this is the plane of journey, how do I imagine my body in relation to time?

4.ii

I am sometimes drawn to sound because there is infinite time in a particular instance. It can be deceptive in its layers of reverberation and its layers of histories, like a sense of echo and sustenance and no sense of structure and return. When I am alone in an open space (any space), I make my breathing as audible as possible, I turn it into a low hum letting drone sounds vibrate as free and wobbly as can be, relinquishing any perfectionism. I have also done this with one other person, mirroring voices and feeling reverberance between each other. If I practice for long enough, it’s the most in tune I feel with myself and others, and I am reminded how connection can be a remedy to the rigidity and severity of the world. 

Play or experience below

[Two bodies sit on a riverbank and are asking each other to choose a note. They begin humming, the wind caresses the mic but between these plumes you hear their wobbly voices finding different notes, sustaining for as long as their lungs permit them. An ambient and dulcet tone lingers, as though threading sound through the needle of time. The voices build in layers, warped and mutated to sound like a swarm, and on occasion you hear someone take breath. It is purposefully imperfect, lulling into silence leaving only the voices in their final conversation] 

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about recitation in four dimensions, ways of attuning

This piece was conjured as a response to Animate Loading: 1, by Riana Head-Toussaint. It is an experiment in deeper listening, re-orienting and finding the many ways that we are able to ‘hear’ and connect with the entirety of our bodies and senses. That is, ways of attuning. The recitations traverse space and time, guided by the notion that sound can be a spatial and temporal exploration. It bends the limitations of what it is to be in relation to each other, systems of domination and the world around us - with the hopes of creating a more spacious and inviting way of listening. 

Each recitation has the same form: (1) a moment from Animate Loading: 1 it is in dialogue with (2) a somatic practice or a way of understanding embodiment or a relationship to space (3) lucid writings on sound, listening and gestures (4) a sound piece to listen to, or experience through the descriptors. 

about Conductive Site

Conductive Site is an online program of artworks by six diverse, interdisciplinary artists – Hanna Cormick, Riana Head-Toussaint, Shareeka Helaluddin, Lost all Sorts Collective, Jamila Main, and Daniel Savage – curated by interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist Riana Head-Toussaint.

This collective of artists is unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection – as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space. Unfurling here on the Firstdraft website, Conductive Site aims to create movement, conversation and change through radical re-considerations of so-called public space.

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