Watch Saint Abdullah, Eomac and Rebecca Salvadori create their collaborative audiovisual project, A Forbidden Distance

Directed by filmmaker Andrzej Załęski, a new film traces the evolution of the TIMES-commissioned piece from early studio discussions to live presentation.

Since its inception, The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes (TIMES) has focused on connecting artists across Europe, fostering collaboration through residencies, co-commissions and live performances that encourage exchange beyond borders.

Commissioned by Unsound, Berlin Atonal and Semibreve, The Crossing marked the organisation’s first original artistic creation, which unfolded across two chapters: Białowieża, a project by sound artists Chris Watson and Izabela Dłużyk rooted in the Białowieża Forest, and A Forbidden Distance, an audiovisual work bringing together Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi (Saint Abdullah), Irish sound designer and musician Ian McDonnell (Eomac), and London-based Italo-Australian video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori.

At its core, A Forbidden Distance explored both collective and personal experiences of migration. Performed live, all the artists shared the stage: Saint Abdullah and Eomac played the music, while Salvadori shaped the visual world in real time. Weaving together home videos from Mohammad’s family archive, artist interviews, spoken-word passages, and abstract visual elements, the work told a deeply personal story of displacement that emerged from the discovery of shared histories and a mutual approach to sampling, using fragments of memory, sound, and image as its building blocks.

In a new film documenting the process, Andrzej Załęski captures the trust and intimacy that developed between the artists through studio sessions, conversations and performances, revealing how individual narratives gradually merged into a collective voice. 

Here, Harry Glass, co-founder and curator at Atonal, and Mat Schulz, Artistic Director of Unsound, discuss the value of commissioning and meaningfully engaging with cross-disciplinary works.

Can you tell us a little bit about TIMES and how this commission came about?

Mat Schulz: TIMES is an EU-funded project bringing together 10 different festivals across Europe. We curate together as part of the platform, and an important aspect is the creation of co-commissioned works, one each year. The Crossing was commissioned by Unsound, Atonal and Semibreve – a project in two parts. Białowieża involved bringing together field recordists Chris Watson and Izabela Dłużyk, who worked together in the last primeval forest in Europe across Poland and Belarus. A Forbidden Distance by Eomac, Saint Abdullah and Rebecca Salvadori explores the idea of displacement. Each work is concerned with borders in different ways.

Harry Glass: We’ve been working together for almost two decades, creating contexts for experimental sound, performance and visual art, including directing the Berlin Atonal festival. TIMES was introduced to us as a way of extending the scope and diversity of that work, connecting us more directly with other European festivals.  

The performances blended different mediums – how did this blurring fit into the TIMES curatorial approach?

MS: With TIMES, we were several curators sitting in a room together trying to come up with ideas. This is different from the usual process, where commissioned ideas and connections develop more organically. It was a very interesting challenge, though, to have a budget, certain requirements. It did create a kind of blurring of ideas and curatorial perspectives. With our group, it resulted in two interconnected and very unique projects – which wasn’t the original idea at all, but is another form of blurring.

HG: That collapse between forms – between performance, film, sound and space – was part of how all the curatorial partners approached the work. The result of having so much curatorial input was an output that was open and varied in its form. It was a performance as a document, and a film that became a kind of social event.

What was it like to be in the room for the performances themselves?

MS: I loved both shows, and the interplay between the two. Whilst Białowieża was presented in total darkness, A Forbidden Distance was an immersive audiovisual show, and a very unique one at that, posing biographical as well as collective questions about migration and movement. 

HG: The performances themselves had a huge dynamic range – from near-silence to the sound of a gunshot, from abstract sound design to moving percussive rhythms. The audience was inside those atmospheres. You could feel everyone trying to stay with it without breaking the spell.

What has it been like working with Andrzej Zaleski on the A Forbidden Distance film?

HG: Andrzej came into the project very naturally. His way of filming space and gesture already felt close to how we think about music and time.

Finally, is there anything that has surprised you in the commissioning of these pieces and the making of this film? 

HG: The audiovisual form allows contradictions to stay alive without resolving them. It can hold things that are both true and uncertain at once – which is not to say that the work lacks a political vision, or refuses to have a determinate standpoint. 

Watch Zaleski’s film below.