Call for Humbaba, 2025
Sound Incantation and Listening Ritual

As 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?