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Synopsis

We’re covered with impermeable skin and our eyes are turned outwards. How easy it is to forget what we’re made of.
Events of loss remind us that we are our body while our body isn’t only our own.

عيوننا تنظر إلى الخارج وأجسادنا مغلفة بجلدٍ كتيم، كم هو سهلٌ أن ننسى باطنها.
أجسادنا تملكنا ولكننا لا نملكها تماماً.

Description

Shot in the Fayoum Western desert and the Red Sea coast in Egypt, and the volcanic Greek island of Nisyros among other places, this film is weaved by a quest to the unknown, where memory seldom interferes, to which the spirit is drawn. A quest in which the material world whispers the way to the dark rooms of the immaterial world.

There is a truth only one’s ink can write, an exchange between the matter blood and the matter spirit, a freedom from fear.

Death tells about presence. I lived to encounter its residues, some of them materialised in me. I don’t exactly know how they came about, affection is an absorbing power.

Idle by the sea, the hopes of the solitary drown. Lucifer murmurs. The end points to the uncertainty of the beginning.

To this mystery I am seduced. To thresholds and antonyms, mysteries only whispering presence, through the primordial, through the origin, in matter, and in sleep.

Synopsis

We’re covered with impermeable skin and our eyes are turned outwards. How easy it is to forget what we’re made of.
Events of loss remind us that we are our body while our body isn’t only our own.

عيوننا تنظر إلى الخارج وأجسادنا مغلفة بجلدٍ كتيم، كم هو سهلٌ أن ننسى باطنها.
أجسادنا تملكنا ولكننا لا نملكها تماماً.

Description

Shot in the Fayoum Western desert and the Red Sea coast in Egypt, and the volcanic Greek island of Nisyros among other places, this film is weaved by a quest to the unknown, where memory seldom interferes, to which the spirit is drawn. A quest in which the material world whispers the way to the dark rooms of the immaterial world.

There is a truth only one’s ink can write, an exchange between the matter blood and the matter spirit, a freedom from fear.

Death tells about presence. I lived to encounter its residues, some of them materialised in me. I don’t exactly know how they came about, affection is an absorbing power.

Idle by the sea, the hopes of the solitary drown. Lucifer murmurs. The end points to the uncertainty of the beginning.

To this mystery I am seduced. To thresholds and antonyms, mysteries only whispering presence, through the primordial, through the origin, in matter, and in sleep.

This work is born out of the desire to capture some essence in living matter. Through summoning particular moments of personal and surrounding events, it tries to connect inside and outside, or the body with its environment, with the pretext that it is through understanding life that we can grapple with death.

“Idle by the sea” is the natural continuation of previous works driven by my fascination in the relation between the invisible spiritual and the organic raw. This preoccupation has materialized in 2009 in my video work “Come As I Rise”, where I follow closely -almost intimately- a young stranger during “Ashoura”, a religious ritual in south Lebanon. By scrutinizing him closely, I try to understand how through rhythm, blood and a sense of collectivity, this stranger manages to transcend into an alter-state of being. Later in 2012, I worked on “The Tone so Prolonged”, a motion picture in which I placed my camera opposite of my train window during a six-hour trip in Europe, obsessively trying to capture a (self) image against the matter of time. The work puts on display the rhythmic encounters between the inside and the outside and unravels instances where these encounters are, at times, enmeshed, fused or harmonious, and at others, more violent and dissonant.

“Idle by the sea” strives to learn how to see through that which is not seen or that which is taken for granted.

This work is born out of the desire to capture some essence in living matter. Through summoning particular moments of personal and surrounding events, it tries to connect inside and outside, or the body with its environment, with the pretext that it is through understanding life that we can grapple with death.

“Idle by the sea” is the natural continuation of previous works driven by my fascination in the relation between the invisible spiritual and the organic raw. This preoccupation has materialized in 2009 in my video work “Come As I Rise”, where I follow closely -almost intimately- a young stranger during “Ashoura”, a religious ritual in south Lebanon. By scrutinizing him closely, I try to understand how through rhythm, blood and a sense of collectivity, this stranger manages to transcend into an alter-state of being. Later in 2012, I worked on “The Tone so Prolonged”, a motion picture in which I placed my camera opposite of my train window during a six-hour trip in Europe, obsessively trying to capture a (self) image against the matter of time. The work puts on display the rhythmic encounters between the inside and the outside and unravels instances where these encounters are, at times, enmeshed, fused or harmonious, and at others, more violent and dissonant.

“Idle by the sea” strives to learn how to see through that which is not seen or that which is taken for granted.