rym hayouni
master expanded scenography

ARCHIVE 2023- 2025 


third 
seme
ster 
start
ing 
poi
nt




"common ground"
september 21 - 22 2024

re-nature festival  at Ruigoord amsterdamin collaboration with thatweirdplantguy (Jaspar) on the living willow structure





h
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 th
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 d
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in this first act i wanted to establish a relation between the story of my collection, the soil and the spectators

the key focuses was on:
giving receiving touching strucutre feeling attention storytelling  

i started from the question of how can sensorial activation facilitate relational engagement, 
and
how can storytelling performatively frame my research questions and context? 






c o m mon 

reflecting on my soil collection journey over three months from farms and gardens across the netherlands,i came to see soil not as something confined to a specific place, territory or enclosure
but as living matter—constantly generating, regenerating. its trajectories are always being invented and reinvented. yet, more significantly it is deeply intertwined with our human history of exploitation, colonization, industrialization, monocultures, trade, displacement, urban expansion and environmental crisis.
i didn’t imagine “de-collecting” as simply returning the soil to where it came from, but rather as a research of a way to transform it into a common ground that we collectively build, activate and inhabit as a public

 g r o un d


spr
ead 
it!

in keeping with the idea of challenging territory and borders while embodying movement, i gave each spectator an envelope with a small amount of soil and invited them to spread it in a place and a time that felt meaningful to them





"of soil and decolleting"
june 6 - 9 2024

- HKU biodesign challenge group show at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd Museum - Utrecht

- Make presentation at Pastoe









while soil is a substance that embodies movement, migration, and collaboration through the micro-organisms that inhabit it, whose trajectories are constantly being invented and reinvented, my encounter with the different lands I visited and the collection of soil samples led me to question my relationship with the earth and my position within all the enclosures, divisions, borders, and the possessive and exploitative forces over land

moving from collecting to searching for collective ways of ‘de-collecting’, I chose the cellar to frame the experience from the soil’s perspective and invited people to engage their senses—listening, smelling, touching—and to gather around the ‘decollecting structure,’ where spontaneous, unpredictable moments recurred, with spectators engaging in debate and exchange around the questions and words they encountered

the ‘decollecting structure’ became an arena where spectators came together as a public, with the soil as the medium that activated this relationship 
this aspect stood out to me and I wanted to incorporate it into my next show

another surprising aspect that made me reflect on the exhibition format was noticing that people rarely listen or read unless instructed to do so, which led me to consider reintegrating myself into the work to perform the contextualization and deployment of the research aspects









i went on a soil collecting journey from farms, gardens and community-run lands across the netherlands

creating relationships with the communities that inhabit the earths above and beneath was the subject of this phase

i plunged into the shadowed geographies. I touched, listened, engaged with labour, sowing seeds, making compost but more importantly, i dived into the stories and the embodied experience of the spaces and its human and non-human inhabitants


you are invited to dive into my findings from this journey of collecting soil, sounds and stories



collecting meaningful materials - 
ground/soil




samples of my earth collection

collected from more than 6 locations around the netherlands, with sound/infrasound recordings and stories with the communities that live with the earth (human and non-human)





ارض حريه كرامه وطنيه


land, freedom, collective dignity  
a slogan that has been with me for a long time, since the revolutionary momentum in tounes in 2010, when we raised it in the protests, wrote it on the walls, on the banners, we sang and shouted it, it came up in our conversations, in our visions of the sovereignty and independence of our lands

in the past semester, perhaps even years, I have turned my attention to the interstices in cities that have been created, or rather overrun, by the political programming of urban spaces.
they have become areas that have no specific function, no specific production value, no active role in the web of trajectories, signals, instructions, restrictions, power relations

they are just there
immanent

i like to go there, to step aside from the flow of traffic, to stand in the in-between which feels inexistent until we make it present by inhabiting it, transforming it, activating its performative potential

i looked and all i found was dirt, soil, biomass, decaying debris, stones inhabited by microscopic organisms, a complex layer composed of various "others"
what i saw was a symbiosis of things we often see as separate, they grow, they evolve, they move as a one network of self-organising systems

after digging into the soil as a substance, i saw in it a biosphere highly charged with interdependent times, stories, histories, memories, dreams, identities, homes, belonging, roots
they are all there, traces of our past, inherited from our ancestors, and of our present, defined by ourselves

Vivieros De Castro* said in one of his lectures: "the experience that each 'self' has of the 'other' can, however, be radically different from the experience that the 'other' has of its own appearance and practices." -- Lecture 1, p. 51

it seems to me that when we turn our gaze to our other, non-human selves, who perceive reality from a different perspective, within a very different temporality, we learn so much about how the world is one of relative semblances, for example, what is solid earth to us is airy sky to the beings who inhabit the strata below us, and what is airy sky to us is solid earth to those who inhabit the strata above us. 

my research this term will focus on this world of relative semblances, where different kinds of beings see the same things differently






*(a brazilian anthropologist who works on the amazonian cosmologies and amerindian perspectivism (the way in which humans, animals, and spirits see both themselves and one another, an idea that suggests a redefinition of the classical categories of « nature », « culture », « super nature » based on the concept of perspective)


Press the Play button to start playing

 






the screens frame the microscopic scale of what is above
in an arrangement that reproduces the syntax of my experiment during the workshops

 

             
             Press the Play button to start playing
              footage from screenspaces workshop shot by Julia

 MIcroscopic shot of moss tree
       shot from framing senses workshop during an experiment






THE BELLS

experimentation with bells and 3 participants
Bells made by Auguste Garufi and part of our on-going collaboration “The 10,000 Year Project”







LINES OF FLIGHT


experimentation with sounds and materials Transducers/  
Metal/ Concrete/ metal dust/ Chains/ Moss tree 
Field recordings
tunisian chant performed by Fatma Felhi 
prose written by me




    
trajectories are retraced following the voices emerging from the metal poles   
the patterns are constantly changing and taking new shapes, revealing a conversation and an encounter between our position, the paths we follow, and the way the space responds to our experience
these elements are interconnected and influence each other
i view space as a composition, a multiplicity of relations and experiences
by altering the trajectory, new stories emerge
when we collectively break away from this striation, we are collectively writing a new narrative
chains as lines of striation but also as lines of flights that enable the reconfiguring of the striation
chains as bridges connecting the political dimension of the space with personal stories that are contained within it 
the space feels striated and rough, but on the other side, it offers the potential for transformation