MACRO's Audio Room hosts the Palestinian Sound Archive, a sound research project founded in 2020 by Mo’Min Swaitat - artist, researcher, actor, musician and filmmaker based in London - which collects, preserves and makes music, voices and recordings from Palestine accessible once again.

Through the Archive, distributed by the record label Majazz Project, he reissues cassette tapes and vinyl records originally released between the 1960s and the 1990s. Dedicated to digitising traditional music in order to preserve this musical heritage and bring it to the attention of younger generations, recordings are made available both in their original form and remixed by contemporary DJs, artists and musicians.

The project at MACRO offers a journey through Palestinian culture, from traditional celebrations and parties to recordings of everyday life and testimonies connected to revolutionary movements. Spanning disco, funk, spoken word, orchestral pieces, and Bedouin psychedelic music, the tracks evoke memories of places and communities while addressing themes of displacement, resistance and cultural erasure. For years, Mo’Min Swaitat has explored the layered soundscapes of the Middle East, investigating sound as a means of healing, transmitting memory and asserting presence. The Palestinian Sound Archive thus becomes a space for connection and resistance, where music serves as a means of preserving and sharing cultural heritage.

“It’s not the establishment of a physical site which is a very colonialist notion it’s about an attitude to history, heritage, memory that goes beyond physical relics and opens up the archive to new connections, people, communities and futures that can be more utopian - even when we’re living through this modern dystopia.” 

Mo’Min Swaitat