Articles tagged with ‘Arabic hip-hop’

• Peacefender

  Peacefender is a sound artist and hip-hop producer of Lebanese background who has been working in western Sydney for 20 years. He formed C.O.D. in the early 1990s, and did production work with veteran Westside group Def Wish Cast, among others. He was also a key figure in Death Defying Theatre’s 1995 Sydney Community hip-hop project Hip-hopera, and has run numerous hip-hop workshops with young people of non-English speaking backgrounds at the Liverpool Migrant Resource Centre, Bankstown Youth Centre and elsewhere. With Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) in Parramatta he has co-ordinated exhibitions and workshops with Australian visual and sound artists of Arabic background. He has done sound installations, hip-hop workshops and visual arts projects in Sydney, Beirut, and Berlin. He has also released several CDs of his own work and compilations of hip-hop by young people of Arabic and other backgrounds, including Unit 5 Welcome You to the Camps, recorded in Arabic in Beirut with Palestinian refugees. In this interview, Peacefender talks to Tony Mitchell about running workshops, combining hip-hop with theatre, visual arts and sound design, and using hip-hop within Sydney’s Arabic speaking communities.

  Tags: Arabic hip-hop, youth work, juvenile justice, Hip-Hopera, multiculturalism, Western Sydney, workshops, community work, Interviews