FIVE CATS AND ONE VISITOR

( STUDY FOR COMPOSITION V )

 

Production year: 2011

 

Format: Video (HDV), stretched fabrics.

 

Participants: 5 anonymous women from Damascus.

 

Visiting Ibn Arabi’s “alam al-khayal” as a parallel plane within Damascus; the city turned inside out.

 

 

This work is an expanded video portrait of women from Damascus and their internal experiences of the city. Through conversation, and a playful investigation into the activity of seeing someone, I have tried the impossible task of stepping into the women’s bodies and experience the spaces inside of them.

 

As a visitor I end up influencing the stories, and mix the experience of the women into my own internalized psychology: Going out is not a reality, not because it is impossible, but because everything seems to be the inside of something else. Movement does not always go forward, but flow inside the folds of a blanket, and rests in the fur of her cat.

 

This work is mapped out into a formal wall installation of patterned fabrics. As the stories gets caught in-between the surfaces, an experience emerge that normally feels invisible or impossible for me to describe.