The Maroons

To maroon is to intentionally disappear, to flee the plantation and captivity, to find the forest or a cave, and build a life inside the blind spots of power. The Maroons is a sound work that follows these figures: not as a historical subject but as an ongoing condition, a mode of being that refuses capture, refuses legibility, refuses computation, and insists on survival through concealment.

Built from voices, field recordings, and layers of processed and degraded sound, the composition moves through atmosphere, silence, noise, and texture. The maroons do not explain themselves: they move, wait, listen, vanish, and reappear. The Maroons draws on the unpredictability of limited and ageing hardware and analogue circuits; tools that introduce materiality and accident into the signal; the native’s low-tech as a refusal of the settler's high-tech quest for legibility and control.

Fugitivity here is not only a historical phenomenon. It is a present living condition, the logic by which the dispossessed, the colonised, and the native carve out spaces of life that remain opaque to the systems that seek to track, classify, and eliminate them. The Maroons positions sound as one of those spaces: a medium that can hold what images cannot, that can be felt before it is understood, and that escapes, always slightly, the demand to be seen: Haitian resistance in Grotte Marie-Jeanne, Palestinian and Lebanese resistance in the underground of Gaza and south Lebanon.

Credits

Firas Shehadeh, The Maroons (2026) 

Stereo, 18’31’’, WAV (24-bit, 48kHz) / MP3 (320-kbps, 48kHz) 

Commissioned by Ibraaz Publishing