installation

Correspondence on migrating sediments (2019) is a three-part project consisting of a sound installation, a performance and a written piece created for the Owela Festival publication. The project was created in collaboration with För Künkel, with audio by HILDA T, and texts by Bachtyar Ali Der Letzte Granatapfel, John Berger The Seventh Man, Édouard Glissant Poetics of Relation, För Künkel and Renata Gaspar.

The main character of the project – a pile of sand – is the only performer on stage (both when we conceived it as ‘installation’ and ‘performance’), upon whom a dramaturgy of sound, words, light and smoke is cast. The pile, a migrant in transit, speaks of her journey, not toward ‘integration’, as envisioned by dominant discourses on migration, but rather toward possibility and further creation. The pile’s tale of how words and concepts travel with the movement of her body exposes the interconnectedness of sonic and semantic territories, as well as the untranslatability of some of the borders encountered (material and symbolic). Piles have their own language; a language marked by scattered lines of evasion.

Correspondence on migrating sediments was commissioned by Kaleni Kollectiv for the Owela Festival - The Future of Work, financed by Turn Fund and Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation, Germany; the installation was presented at Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Germany and at the National Theatre of Namibia, Windhoek, and the performance at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg-TAK Berlin, Germany

Stories from the perspective of piles (2017) is a visual installation created in collaboration with För Künkel. The piece comprises a collection of photographs taken during our journey throughout Occupied Palestine in March 2016, fictional and non-fictional text, and pictures of different model piles.

A pile of sand is a gathering of several units as well as a repository of various stories. A pile of sand marks a moment in between places, in between states and shapes of being, and in between functions and possible futures. Throughout the process of their formation, piles accumulate numerous trajectories, both physical and narrative. Depending on their location and context, piles can indicate the place of a future infrastructure, or of a recently destroyed building, or like in most cases across Occupied Palestine, where permanent acts of rebuilding take place, piles can also suggest defiance and a mode of resistance.

Stories from the perspective of piles was exhibited at Künstlerhaus Göttingen, Germany

Catalogue of Correspondence (2015-2016) is a two year-long exchange project between För Künkel and myself. The project started when För left Berlin (where we were both living at the time) and moved to another German city. As a consequence, we started using the postal service to maintain the regularity of our interactions. Through the exchange of letters, postcards, drawings, collages, and small objects, we sought to complement the more usual forms of communication (via phone calls, Skype calls, and emails) and to not only preserve our relation of friendship and artistic collaboration, but also to foster it in the context of a new spatiality.

Our intention was to nurture our friendship by creatively exploring the new spatial setting in which we found ourselves, each one living in a different city, allowing for an unplanned archive of correspondence to be generated and triggered by our physical distance, experimenting with correspondence as a means to observe the ways our communication/collaboration would be informed by our separate everyday lives. The absence of a predetermined aim to publicly exhibit the work meant that we did not have a particular destination or deadline in mind, which would eventually crystallise our exchange process into a fixed output. This open-endedness allowed us to engage with the project by entirely focussing on our friendship’s needs and wants – the project ended only when För returned to Berlin. Yet, questions as these have continuously accompanied me: how does the physical absence of a friend/collaborator inform collaborative modes of art-making? And, how can the spatiality of artistic collaboration be conveyed in/through friendship? I ended up sharing my speculations on how the exchange of words and objects, and the silences they might carry, give shape to different ways of communicating and sharing presence over distance at a public presentation in the context of my practice-based PhD at University of Roehampton, UK.