Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou

Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa
Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou
Concert, DJ set

For centuries, only the hands of male maalems have touched the guembri - until Asmaa Hamzaoui came along. With her concert, she opens two festival days dedicated to women in Gnawa culture. In a ritual universe in which women have always played the central role of the mqaddma - the healers who prepare the lila, lead the trance and maintain the connection to the spirits - playing the three-stringed spit lute itself has always been reserved for men. This unwritten but ironclad law has been overturned by a maâlma born in Casablanca in 1998. Asmaa Hamzaoui is the daughter of Maalem Rachid Hamzaoui, a respected member of the Casablanca Brotherhood, and a Saharawi dancer. Both lines, her mother's from the far south of Morocco and her father's from the most traditional Tagnaouite school, are united in her person. She broke with convention when her father began teaching her the guembri at the age of seven; at twelve, he took her on tour and eventually gave her his own instrument, which he himself had once inherited from his master. In 2012, at the age of fourteen, she founded Bnat Timbouktou (The Daughters of Timbuktu), together with her sister Aicha and her childhood friend Soukaina Elmeliji. Their performance at the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira in 2017 was a taboo-breaking moment that turned out to be historic; this was followed in 2019 by the internationally acclaimed debut album Oulad Lghaba (Children of the Forest) on the Swedish label Ajabu! Records, followed by its successor L'bnat in 2024, with concerts from New York to WOMEX Tampere and an encounter with Fatoumata Diawara in between. The band's name says it all: Bnat Timbouktou recalls the city from which the trans-Saharan deportation once reached Moroccan soil - and at the same time names the daughters of a heritage that was long denied to them, but never left them. Whoever experiences her on stage today hears not just a music, but a correction: the rediscovery of a female voice at the center of a ritual in which she has always been at home.

19:30-21:00 Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou
21:00-23:00 DJ set (Magnus Hirschfeld Bar)

Venue:
Paulette Nardal Terrace
Magnus Hirschfeld Bar