Finding Humbaba
Ongoing Artistic Research
Finding Humbaba asks: Who protects what remains of Lebanon’s forests? The research returns to the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Humbaba—the feared guardian of the Cedar Forest—is killed and the forest felled to build the gates of Uruk. As Lebanon’s surviving cedars face fragmentation, extraction, political neglect, and climate change, the project searches for Humbaba not as a monster, but as protector, ancestor, and resisting spirit. Through sound, performance, installation, and collective ritual, it considers how our fear of wilderness and otherness shapes the ways we treat land and one another.
At the oldest tree in the forest, we played the incantation.
Call for Humbaba, 2025
Sound Incantation and Listening RitualAs Lebanon’s remaining cedars show increasing signs of illness under a rapidly changing climate, we call for the forest’s lost guardian. Created in collaboration with Farah Azrak, Call for Humbaba is a radio incantation composed from enunciations of the Sumerian text and sounds drawn from the forest soundscape described in Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Layered samples, field recordings, and archival readings reconstruct the echoes of a cedar grove that no longer exists.
We carried the work to an ancient cedar more than three thousand years old, where we performed a listening ritual and sent the signal into the tree and the airwaves, asking: Can sound travel across five millennia? Can it find and reawaken the forest’s lost guardian? Can Humbaba return to guide us—or awaken us to the unfinished consequences of the forest’s destruction?
Call for Humbaba
was featured in Radiophrenia’s
Light at the End of the Dial transmission on September 10, 2026 in Glasgow
Humbaba’s Womb: Mythologies of Fear, 2023
Performance and Multimedia Installation
Presented in Emancipation of the Living curated by the Museum for the Displaced at Galeria Municipal de Almada, Portugal, Mythologies of Fear narrated Humbaba’s killing through the question of fear: the beast was destroyed because he was the one most feared. Through performance and a participatory clay ritual, audiences were invited to consider what we shun, silence, or attempt to conquer because it frightens us. Participants gave physical form to their fears in clay, bringing them into the open to be encountered, held, and transformed.