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





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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