attentions is the premiere of a live audio-visual concept album by Harilay Rabenjamina, an absorbing performance that traverses familial, intimate and political registers, as it stages attentive modes fluctuating from introspective drift to imperative calls to action. The music is composed by Rabenjamina, with additional production by Thélia, Malibu and Joel Rabesolo. The work unfolds through original music, a narrative script and self-directed video, and is performed live with guest musicians and vocalists.

attentions examines how cultural, material and environmental conditions shape ways of being — how we inhabit and see the world. The work posits that credibility, attention, love and power are unevenly distributed within unequal economies of visibility and care and that these variations shape capacities for expression, understanding and empathy. Rabenjamina approaches attention as both a state of focus or vigilance and as a force that can be given, withheld, exhausted or shared, constantly captured and redirected by competing pressures.

Ambient music forms the backbone of the multilayered soundscape, as attentions journeys between Paris, Pessac, Antananarivo and London. Voices are constantly transformed, filtered as if heard through phone calls, radio transmissions or in-flight announcements, while short narrative skits punctuate the album. The sound moves between R&B love songs, pop, trance and club textures, and classical forms fused with traditional Madagascan influences. Shaped by the legacy ambient music, this genre acts as the connective tissue between these contexts. Incorporating scenes of driving lessons across geographically dispersed localities, the work reflects on mobility as a socially regulated passage, and on movement as a way of experiencing regimes of perception.

This event is part of Shortwave: a festival of sound and performance, hosted across four independent South East London venues, bringing together international and local artists, musicians and DJs for an exciting programme of newly commissioned live performance, sound and music.

On 8 May an afterparty will follow on from the performance at Ormside Projects, with a line-up of live and experimental DJ sets hosted by Brief Encounters and Kindred Spirits. On 9 May, South London Gallery will present a new performance piece by Krystle Patel followed by a night at IKLECTIK, where Josh Woolford, Fya, and K’BOKO present approaches to sound as an embodied and spatial practice.