SAWT

Wissal Houbabi

SAWT is a project exploring the ritual practice of the Aita, an ancient poetic song from the Moroccan tradition. Aita is the profound story that tears through the voice of the countryside, an oral archive handed down over centuries of life, love, pain and resistance.

Where word and song are one, body and soul merge, touching in the abyss of a cry, a lament, a sinking that feels almost like dying for an instant, only to be reborn and perceive life with greater vigour. It is the ecstasy felt by the spirit, the pain of a body tormented by itself, the essence of the sacred and the profane, meeting at their deepest point.

There is a life and there are words that lie in the deepest recesses of our feeling; that state emerges with the surrender of reason, swimming in the darkness of our fears, yielding to oblivion, rejecting control; that voice is set free like the very first cry of which we have no memory, only the certainty of its meaning: I exist.

SAWT is a performance rooted in a research project supported by the FONDO network for emerging creativity and adapted for the Public Program of the Italian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Wissal Houbabi

Wissal Houbabi, performance poet, artist, writer, founder and artistic director of Spore. Winner of the FONDO Santarcangelo Teatri 2025/26. WIHO explores the relationship between languages and dialects, between sound, stigma and meaning. Over time, she has distinguished herself through her creativity, her radical vocal and political stance, her provocative irony, and her ability and care in communicating with people. Her work has a clear political perspective, linking the pursuit of beauty to dignity and viewing poetic practice as a radical search for the ‘we’. Her projects explore the epistemology of the diaspora, and she has worked specifically on oral heritage in relation to coloniality, the voice of the body, muscular memory, dreams in the diaspora, and the right to love and be loved. Among her latest works: Impercettibile, experimental poetry projects in Rome and Padua; Wiho & Free Radicals, a spoken jazz band active between Italy and France; Una gran puzza di merda nell’aria, a monologue presented at over forty events including Hangar Pirelli 2022; phonomuseum_rome at the Museum of Civilisation; Offesissima at Ar/ge Kunst Bolzano and much more.