Eden Girma: I hope / I won’t make / any mistak(e)s

ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.

Friday, September 18th at 8pm, ISSUE presents the first commission from 2026 AIR Eden Girma. In this new work for voice and electronics, Girma explores the fraught and ever-shifting nature of being, as colored by loss, language, and belonging. Part dreamscape and part summoning circle, an intimate diasporic familial archive is pieced together through the eyes of a five-year-old child. Improvisation with spoken word and song, digital instruments, live processing, and mixed media, opens a space in which to grapple against both tensions and resonances laced within narratives around migration, cultural preservation, embodied history, and identity making.