[Cancelled] SUPERHOST: Cheb Runner

For one night, restless polymath Cheb Runner takes over SUPERHOST.

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An evening where improvisation, sonic spontaneity and off-centre rhythms unsettle the familiar pulse of 4/4. Cheb Runner moves between Brussels, Rotterdam and Agadir with the same ease as he moves between visual art, club culture and performance. An autodidact audiophile, he develops self-built instruments and tools that connect digital possibilities with traditional sounds and practices.

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For this edition, he invites three artistic collaborators: Libyan interdisciplinary artist Tewa Barnosa, his kindred artistic spirit Khadija El Kharraz Alami – together they developed the performance AJJIT – and T9iti9at, a band rooted in the Moroccan tradition of Dakka Marrakshia.

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Moving between introspective performance and outward expression, intimate conversations and spontaneous musical exchanges, the evening reflects Cheb Runner’s own energy: constantly evolving, deeply intentional and rooted in sincerity. Self-made instruments meet digital technology, while handcrafted expression opens up new possibilities.

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Programme

20:30–21:00 — Tewa Barnosa

Presentation of performance extracts and audio-visual scores by Tewa Barnosa

Tewa Barnosa is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker rooted in both Tripoli and Amsterdam. Working across installation, painting, film, sound and performance, she explores spatial and infrastructural violence, fascist technologies, inherited memories, and transmissions from lands, people and species that persist in the aftermath of genocidal and ecological continuities.

Her practice moves between sonic and oral traditions rooted in Amazigh and Bedouin knowledge systems, electroacoustic composition and field recordings, and visual research into archives, iconography, video games and cinema as tools that shape political imaginaries.

Between 2015 and 2023, she founded and directed WaraQ, an art space and laboratory in Tripoli, where she developed projects around Libya’s social and political realities, including Totalitarian Props, Shifting Sands and Kashkoul of Collective Resistance. Barnosa is an alumna of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (2024–2025) and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2021–2023). Her awards include the S+T+Arts and Ars Electronica African Distinction Award (2025), the Iwalewahaus African Artist Award (2021), and a Martin Roth Initiative fellowship for artists at risk (2019–2020).

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21:15–23:00 — Khadija El Kharraz Alami & Reda Senhaji

Talk / performance extracts from AJJIT

In AJJIT, Khadija El Kharraz Alami and Reda Senhaji shed light on the importance of gathering, remembering, moving and music, and on the power of expressing emotions and sharing them with others. It is an invitation to collectively reanimate our pre-capitalist bodies, and to reflect on and commemorate the lives that have been lost.

Khadija and Reda come from different artistic disciplines, but share a rich and complex cultural identity for which they feel a deep affection. For them, this identity is articulated through polyrhythm, a feature that runs through diverse North African musical traditions.

In her research into the reawakening of pre-capitalist bodies, Khadija, together with Reda, delves into diverse Moroccan musical genres. From Ahwach and Gnaoua to Ghaita, Chaabi and Issawa, they search for stories, rhythms and movements that celebrate their complexity. By revealing the beauty of a complex identity in all its dimensions and allowing it simply to exist, they seek to make that complexity tangible and to honour it.

Khadija El Kharraz Alami is an artist, artistic director and entrepreneur working across theatre, performance, writing, directing and artistic research. She is the founder of KEKA Productions and has developed, in collaboration with different theatres and artists, a series of acclaimed performances, including NU BEN IK MEDEA, RE-CLAIMING SPACE, The Waves, ENSEMBLE PIECE and AJJIT, presented across the Netherlands, Belgium and internationally. AJJIT was developed in collaboration with Reda Senhaji; together, they will share extracts from the performance and discuss the work.

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21:15–23:00 — T9iti9at

Performance by Dakka Jamii

Founded in Brussels in 2017, Dakka Jamii is an artistic group specialising in Dakka Marrakchia, a traditional Moroccan musical form known for its rhythms, chants and festive character. Behind the group is Hichem Bilali, driven by a desire to preserve and pass on Morocco’s cultural heritage to present and future generations.

From weddings and festivals to cultural evenings, traditional celebrations, official ceremonies and community events, Dakka Jamii has performed throughout Belgium and beyond.

Today, Dakka Jamii is an established presence within Brussels’ Moroccan community and contributes, through collective musical practice and performance, to the continuity and transmission of Dakka Marrakchia.

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23:15–00:30 — Cheb Runner DJ set

Cheb Runner moves between Brussels, Rotterdam and Agadir with the same ease as he moves between visual art, club culture and performance. An autodidact audiophile, he develops self-built instruments and tools that connect digital possibilities with traditional sounds and practices. His work embodies a new sound of in-betweenness, shaped by different worlds while moving freely through time.

Drawing on his own field recordings and a personal archive of samples of traditional instruments, built up over years of research and practice, Reda playfully blends analogue and digital textures, supported by a unique collection of synthesisers and other equipment.

His versatility extends beyond music to his work on stage and within the wider cultural field. As one of the driving forces behind (A)WAKE foundation, through collaborations with Meriem Bennani on Sole Crushing and the immersive installation Flipflop, and through his exploration of physicality and force with Khadija El Kharraz Alami, Cheb Runner continually moves between roles, formats and contexts. In his DJ sets too, he moves seamlessly between his own productions and unexpected selections.