rym hayouni
master expanded scenography
2023- 2025
"common ground"
in Re-nature festival at Ruigoord Amsterdam in collaboration with “Thatweirdplantguy” (Jaspar) on the living willow structure
September 21-22 2024
hands in the dirt
in this project i wanted to activate the spectators as a community through
giving receiving touch feeling and driven by the storytelling.
i started from the question of how can the sensorial drives the relational
and
how can spectactors become a temporary autonomous community (in reference to a Temporary Autonomous Zone) that gather around a poetic-political act of planting a living space, a biotope, an open territory that evolves with the seasons,
with the humans and non-humans who inhabit it,
a zone belonging to everyone and which each one redefines anew every time.
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.
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 plant, activate and inhabit as a community.
spread it!
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- Pastoe Fabriek utrecht
while soil is a substance that embodies movement, migration, and collaboration through the micro-organisms that inhabit it, 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.
I chose to frame the experience from the soil’s perspective and invited people to engage their senses, listening, smelling, touch and to come around the structure i installed for a collective gathering/ritual.
spectators engage in a conversations around the gesture of decollecting while listening to a spoken word, field-recordings, infra-sounds 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