INSTALLATIONS

When I attended a Moroccan women’s morning tea gathering and asked if I could stay, Fatima replied: “Of course you can stay, we are the same!”. This phrase guided me on my journey with my Moroccan neighbours. My body and mind were like a sponge, absorbing its surroundings. The Moroccan tea turned into a metaphor for a safe and warm place. A place where it doesn’t matter which language we speak or which religion we belong to, where we can communicate with our bodies and eyes no matter which color they are, a place where we can be so different yet similar at the same time.

The installation was part of the “City Circles” project presented in WOW Amsterdam, June-August 2019.

Eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication, the most reliable, the most dangerous, the most honest and the most “unreadable” part of human connection.

There are hundred years between us; as a contemporary audience and the eye contact made by the individuals in the archival material. We will never know each other. We will never meet one another. They no longer exist. And we will not exist one day, yet our images may well endure a hundred years from now. But when we look into each other’s eyes, we begin to live in the same reality. There is no more time and no more space – only our eye contact… contact made across time and space. How do we see ourselves when they look at us?

The installation was created within the context of the EYE Research Lab (EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam, May 2016) and was a part of the exhibition “Archive as a place to play”, made by Master students of the Netherlands Film Academy.