In this performance and sound installation in public space the Beirut-based artist Omar Itani delves into the hidden acoustic world of the service industry. Focusing on the muffled rhythms of restaurant backrooms, Itani draws parallels between these unseen spaces and the subterranean lives of rats.

Rats, and other downtrodden subjects, is a research project by Omar Itani where he sonically investigates the conditions that structure the service industry. In this particular iteration, Itani actively attends to various elements that make up the subdued soundscape of restaurant kitchens generated by the staff in the back: prep workers, cooks, and cleaners. In its emphasis on that which must remain out of sight, the project attempts to think with the symbolic and material affordances of rats as creatures of the underground. With field recordings and live processing, the piece explores sounds from behind walls, below terrain, inside pipes, ushering a conversation across the base by mimicking peak hearing range. The project centers survival in the overflow of the consumer city, probing the notion of excess with feedback loop techniques and accumulated resonant frequencies and experimenting with the potentially disruptive force of the clandestine. This iteration culminates in a sound piece as part of an installation that will be assembled and activated as a live performance in the underground passage between Byparken and Bergen Storsenter.

OMAR ITANI
Omar Itani is a noise artist and sound designer based in Beirut, Lebanon. His work ranges across various activities, including sound design for film, sound art, installations, field recordings and live performance.

Part of BEK symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality.
21–23 November 2025
Bergen, Norway