Son[i]a #381
Marissa Malik
![Son[i]a #381](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/fztjpegxoais-c.jpeg)
It’s tempting to describe Marissa Malik’s practice as a crossroads—one where music production intersects with mysticism, DJing and astrology. But the way she talks about these complementary aspects instead suggests that they are all on a sort of Möbius strip, a continuum with no beginning or end, on which they harmonically coexist and feed back on each other.
This paradoxical geometry relies on a worldview and a critical gaze that has allowed Marissa to explore and put her own spin on the correlation between language, racial segregation and gender, especially in the framework of diaspora communities like her own: Marissa (also known by her musical moniker Manuka Honey), was raised in Connecticut by a Mexican mother and a Pakistani father and is now based in London. Which also goes some way to explain her often chaotic reinterpretation of Latinx-infused club music from all over the Global South.
We sat down with Marissa Malik to talk about language, rituals, migration, mysticism, barriers, queerness and sexuality in her musical domain. And we got the ball rolling with her dissertation ‘Language Erasure: The loss of mother tongue(s) in diaspora’.
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