attentions is the premiere of a live audio-visual concept album by Harilay Rabenjamina. An absorbing performance that traverses familial, intimate and political registers, it stages attentive modes fluctuating from introspective drift to imperative focus. The music is performed live with Thelia.

As the work journeys between London, Paris, Antananarivo, and Pessac, the script weaves together personal narrative and conceptual reflection to explore forms of mobility across places, genres, and modes of expression. Voices are constantly transformed, heard through phone calls, radio transmissions, or in-flight announcements, while short anecdotes punctuate the music.

Part cinematic performance and part pop concert, attentions blends ambient, R&B love songs, traditional Malagasy and classical influences. Rabenjamina approaches attention as both a state of focus or vigilance and as a force that can be given, withheld, exhausted, or shared—something that is constantly captured and redirected by competing pressures.

Performance Duration: Approx 75 mins

Access info: Performance contains some flashing lights, amplified sound, and haze.

Shortwave

This commission is presented as part of Shortwave, a new festival of sound and performance, unfolding across four independent venues in south east London. Bringing together international and local artists, musicians and DJs, the festival spans two nights of commissioned live works, experimentation and performance. 

Shortwave creates spaces where sound becomes a conduit for connection—between disciplines and communities. It celebrates experimental practices while amplifying diverse voices and perspectives. 

Full programme

ORMSIDE Projects presented by Brief Encounters and Kindred Spirits
Fri 8 May / 10 PM – 04 AM

Produced in dialogue with Rabenjamina’s performance, Shortwave continues with the night programme at ORMSIDE Projects. Brief Encounters and Kindred Spirits present a series of sonic experimentation and left-field club transmission, reverberating the space between inner worlds and the dance floor, including Harilay b2b with Thelia alongside performances from Yawning Portal, VISIO, Jiyoung Wi, NEXCYIA and LC. Across ambient collage, speculative narrative and low-end club pressure, the programme unites artists who treat sound as a portal for memory, fiction and transformation.

South London Gallery
Sat 9 May / 5:30 PM

Krystle Patel presents CLOUT, a 4 player performance that weaves together writing, spatialised sound and video to investigate the artists’ bio as a site for the emergence of doppelgängers. Her work is time based and interrogates the language of power structures and value systems through original scores, choreography, spoken word and light.

IKLECTIK
Sat 9 May / 7:30 - 10:30 PM

For the closing event, IKLECTIK brings together Joshua Woolford, I Am Fya and K’BOKO, each offering distinct approaches to sound as an embodied and spatial practice. Their work spans cultural research, diasporic identity, spirituality and rhythm, from Woolford’s exploration of lived experience and socio-political realities, to I Am Fya’s visual album Homeland, exploring identity, culture and radical self‑love, and K’BOKO’s immersive blend of Afro-Brazilian rhythms with electronic production and synths to create immersive journeys.

Shortwave is supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation.