rym hayouni
master expanded scenography
ARCHIVE 2023- 2025
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)
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the screens frame the microscopic scale of what is above
in an arrangement that reproduces the syntax of my experiment during the workshops
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footage from screenspaces workshop shot by Julia
MIcroscopic shot of moss tree
shot from framing senses workshop during an experiment