To be moved as a child, to live with displacement as a condition, to exist stretched between two poles and always slightly to the side. How do you narrate a deeply personal story of coming to know your own identity when it is formed through multilayered exchanges of meanings, forms, and memories, where fragments slide apart, cross, and occasionally find new ways of meeting?

Earthly Bonds, the commissioned work for Borealis by Jaleh Negari, begins here: investigating displacement as an abstract concept — where shifted blocks move in sequenced horizontal and vertical flows — and as a concrete lived experience shaped by migration, memory, linguistic confusion, and cultural fragmentation. It unfolds through layered sonic and visual forms, weaving graphic scores, fragmented patterns, and rhythmic sequences into a multisensory exploration of movement, memory, and relations.
The work is closely connected to Negari’s exhibition at Lydgalleriet, ما به هم می رسیم | we reach each other, which presents a complementary perspective on these ideas through sound, visual and spatial forms.

The project grows from a personal and political examination of Negari’s own story: the many-layered motions and meanings of migration, and the tension between the West and West Asia. It is a work about displacement, and about being displaced in one’s being and language — about feeling both disconnected and, at the same time, indisputably bonded.

Iranian-Danish drummer, composer, and sound artist Jaleh Negari is Borealis Artist in Residence in 2025/2026. Working with live performance, graphic material, and field recordings, she performs live as part of the collective Selvhenter, as well as presenting solo and duo exhibitions and collaborations with dancers across her many projects.

Earthly Bonds is not only a way to understand one’s identity — it is a healing practice, an antidote to division. Through exchanges with family, friends, and peers, and through artistic processes that produce woven patterns, graphic forms, and sound, Negari symbolically reassembles dispersed parts of herself. In this work, the body remembers where it belongs: to people who touch and speak in other ways, who form other sounds, who see the world from other angles, who dance other dances with the earth. Without the effort to keep these ties alive, they can smoulder at the edges, dry out, and slip from memory.