rym hayouni
master expanded scenography
2023- 2025
semester 3
this semester, the dialectics of immersion and distanciation has been directing my research strategies, consisting in shifting between zooming into the senses, focusing on the details—what we see, what we don’t see, the fragments of times and spaces —and stepping back to view these micro perspectives in relation to the environment we inhabit
i’m drawn to the spatial dynamic qualities that are contrasted from the inside to the outside, working them out in a new assemblage that let things happen in a new way
"head in the moss i see through the cracks" and "line in the earth" two hybrid spaces
where I wanted to draw an intersection of trajectories and temporalities whose contrasts create a tension, a friction
through cracks and friction, I explore how we occupy space and how heterogeneous temporalities intersect within it
in order to explore the intersection between earth/land, politics and public space as a framework for enclosures and territories, I choose juxtaposition as a method to highlight the oppositions, the antagonisms
juxtaposing different material qualities, spatial qualities, but also the perspectives and movements to create visual conversations
in spaces within spaces, where absence is a language, i invite you to shift your perspective, to look in and out, to use your body in order to have a layered experience of a particular environment, a particular landscape
head in the moss, i see through the cracks
a line on the ground
performance-essay experiment
digging into the intersection between public spaces and the question of earth/ground in the context of territories, borders,enclosures, ownership…
following up with the question of (shared) spaces in the framework of enclosures and territories, from earth and lands to public spaces, i am drawn to capture a number of conflicts and opposites through my field observations. i have found in the hybrid spaces where antagonisms meet, an interesting scenographical material to touch on the limits and absurdity of these political questions.
i try to navigate this through performative actions where I tried to question the public space, ontologically and semantically
can we activate a space as public simply by the way we perform it?
is it a space we come to by living it in a certain way?
or a space that implies a certain way of living within it?
i am interested to the idea of « invasive species » within a capitalized understanding of « nature », shaped by classification of what we desire and what we reject. i’m equally fascinated by architectural spaces that invite occupation and reconfiguration.
these notions of places underline paradoxes, conflicts and antagonisms that expose the limits and inconsistencies of territorial claims and politics of striation. it’s at these edges, these points of escape that i want to direct my scenographic work
i dig into the parallels between the enclosures in plantation systems and today’s cities, where the logic of hierarchy—rooted in species, race, gender, class, geography, sexuality—are persistently inscribed
for me, the phenomenological experience changes our perception of space, that's why I want to recreate and stage these spatial notions, superimpose them, contrast them, put them in contradiction,
my work is not a pre-defined script but an interactive form with the process that unfolds in the doing
i began by observing and capturing layers of superimposed reality, and by playing with contrast, differentiated movements and rhythms, i let things interact by following them delicately and giving myself time to make sense of them
i'm interested in cracks, frictions, paradoxes and conflicts, not to draw conclusions and say what works and what doesn't, but to reflect, mock, draw out the absurdity, play with hybridization, push it to the extreme
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2681463/3317975#tool-3319768
on building blocks
"common ground"
september 21 - 22 2024
re-nature festival at Ruigoord amsterdam in collaboration with thatweirdplantguy (jaspar) on the living willow structure
hands in the dirt
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?
common ground
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
spread 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 come around the structure I installed for a collective gathering/ritual.
spectators engaged in debate and conversations around the action of letting go of the soil they were engaged with, and with the words they were listening to from the spoken word-sound installation.
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
these two exhibitions were an invitation 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 participantsBells made by Auguste Garufi and part of our on-going collaboration “The 10,000 Year Project”
LINES OF FLIGHT
experimentation with sounds and materials
Metal/ Concrete/ metal dust/ Chains/ Moss tree
Field recordings
tunisian chant performed by Fatma Felhi
prose written by me
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