shemza.digital roots #1 is a contemplative audiovisual meditation developed in dialogue with Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Roots series. Emerging from Aphra Shemza’s own transcendental experience following an intensive breathwork journey, the work was further shaped through collaborative workshops with young people from the ArtForum Youth Group at Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

Designed as a ten-minute immersive meditation experience, the piece invites audiences into a heightened state of self-awareness and interconnectedness with one another and the natural world. Its visual language draws on research workshops in Arabic calligraphy with Razwan Ul-Haq and Daniel Lowe at the British Library, abstracting forms from a fourteenth-century Iraqi manuscript on plants, specifically a passage dedicated to wild cumin. The soundscape combines traditional South Asian instrumentation by Petit Oiseaux with the electronic and vocal textures of NYX, weaving ancestral and contemporary sonic traditions together.

In an increasingly fragmented and polarised world, shemza.digital roots #1 offers a shared space for reflection, connection and collective presence, foregrounding the possibility of empathy and communion through sound, breath and image. Echoing the meditation’s central refrain — “in the personal is the universal, in the one is the all” — the work proposes interconnectedness not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived and embodied experience.

ArtForum members that contributed to this project: Michael, Joy, Olivia, Mickey, Jenna, Anna, Lizzie, Emily.

ArtForum youth group is led by RAG arts Rosalind Manasseh as part of Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s youth programs and supported by Dinosaur Kilby Digital Producer.

shemza.digital roots is supported by Arts Council England and the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza.