SAB‘AT ’AMWAJ
video installation
Year: 2021
A silent video on loop of a ritual in the sea, accompanied with an audio piece in which I speak of memory, the Atlantic, history, science fiction, and gaps in the sand. "Sab‘at ’Amwaj" is raw, imperfect, and anchored. It speaks to vulnerability and care, avoids the exoticization of our rituals, and straddles object of art and object of research. The ritual and the piece itself are intimately linked to lineage. A desire to keep, to record, not to forget. Finding beauty in knowledge, in memory, in transmission: a sense of belonging, of pertaining to a longer legacy. But also finding beauty in the things that get diluted with time, turn into tales, never to know which part was real and which wasn’t.
The installation looks at the ocean as a space of separation and a space of linkage, attempting to rekindle the rituals that have bound our bodies and the ocean for generations and which have been erased by modernization and colonization. I invite a return of our bodies to bodies of water, to think and feel an embodied and haptic experience as an alternative to the western and removed experience of the ocean. And yet, the image and the sound are separated, echoing a tension and a need for opacity.
“Sab‘at ’amwaj is a Moroccan ritual where you stand in the ocean and wait for seven waves to wash over you. The water takes away your troubles, offering you renewal, a part of you fading in the waves.” [Transcribed Excerpt from the audio]
MENA Film Festival 2022