Maimouna Ly is an Edinburgh-based multidisciplinary artist working across voice, performance, sound, and storytelling. She approaches voice as both movement and memory, a way of carrying stories across time, place, and experience. Her work explores belonging, identity, and the traces we hold in the body. 

She is one of this year’s Arts Open awardees – an initiative which provides creatives from refugee backgrounds with funding and support to share their work with new audiences in Scotland. 

She will be presenting a new solo performance titled Listening for Home, inviting audiences into a shared space of deep listening, where personal and collective stories resonate across time and place.

We caught up with Maimouna about her event. 

Why you wanted to be involved with Refugee Festival Scotland? 

There’s something meaningful about sharing my work with people with connected values and creating a community experience.  

The festival creates space for voices like mine who hadn’t been broadcast in Scotland. I also want to create a space for storytelling and showcasing artistic experiences that are often underrepresented. This festival is a great way to gather people from different backgrounds together and reflect on themes of memory, belonging and identity. 

Yeah, that’s exactly what this festival is about. How does your own journey of migration impact your storytelling and artistic practice?

I’m originally from Burkina Faso, which is a French speaking country in the west of Africa. My family moved to France when I was young, but we moved back to Burkina Faso a few years later.  

Even in my home country, I felt like I was in between countries. Between civilisations. Between completely different ways of thinking. I wasn’t completely French, but I also wasn’t completely from Burkina Faso. When I was 17, I moved back to France with my sisters and was again between places. Because I was always in the middle, I became a gatherer of people and cultures and was drawn to exploring those connections.  

 How does your multi-disciplinary practice explore that?

I’ve always been very connected to cultures through music. When you listen to music, you hear the memory of all these civilisations and people who have moved through the world. Music from places all over the world will use similar instruments but in different ways. For example, guitars are used in music globally, but the sound will be different. When you hear a sitar, you’re immediately drawn to India. You start to smell different spices and things like that. But you get a completely different vibe when you hear a guitar used in American country music.  

Yeah exactly, there’s so much history and culture in these different kinds of music and storytelling. What can people expect from your event?

It’s called Listening for Home. The performance will combine voice and stories to expose those questions in a sensory and emotional way. I was interested in the idea that home is not always a physical place. Sometimes it exists in sounds and language – it’s beyond time and space, or even the body itself.  

I hope the audience connect to themselves and with others.  The performance will invite them to dive into a space of listening and reflection. I’m not trying to give one message or an interpretation. I create an atmosphere where people can have their own reflections and feelings about connection.  

What do you hope audiences will take from it?

I hope that they will feel connected to the idea that movement through the world is a shared human experience. I’ve moved around so many places and that has really shaped me. That’s a story I share with so many people. Not just people who have moved countries. Even just if you’ve moved from Aberdeen to Edinburgh or you family has moved away, you’ve had to make these new connections. So, I hope that audiences can reflect on the performance and feel curious and empathetic.  

Listening for Home will be held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh on 17 June. Get your tickets here.

Follow on Instagram: naomha_om

Maimouna Ly’s website: https://www.naomhaom.com/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Mai-Ly_NaomhaOmAira

Refugee Festival Scotland 2026 is made possible with support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.