Week 1: 3rd – 7th July

The artistic process of the group is driven from a communal approach through which we try to decentralise creative hierarchies, both by valuing the being, cooking and eating together as part of our research and project development as well as by allocating and circulating the leading role in all our research tasks and activities.

In this first week the important themes for us were: arriving, settling in, re-connecting, imagining and inspiring.

Revisiting and responding to the themes of the Zamakan (time-space) concept;  tapping into our collective resources and skills in different disciplines, pooling from our personal experiences, artistic research and work that relates to the theme. The mediums we are working with are:

• Painting
• Video
• Live feed and projections
• Movement, dance and choreography
• Sound and text

Roles and interests in the first week:

Reyna: Painting, hanging canvases in the theatre.

Ghazal: Filming, video projections, live feed, figuring out and getting familiar with the tech.

Joni: Choreography/ movement and prepping the body, setting up the workspace on stage.

Kinga: movement, movement generated sounds, not necessarily composed sounds.

Re-visiting themes of SPACE AND TIME, PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE! The Zamakan idea started with experiences at the German Bureaucratic Amts and institutions and observations of people’s behaviour in the ‘waiting rooms’. This behaviour and these gestures are our source for generating gestural movement sequences.

Adding to the pool of research:

Ghazal: the waiting positions of the body, how you hold yourself with your arms, small movements of the hands, feet and face, how your mind moves to the past or the future as you are stuck in the present.

Joni: the strange experiences of the Auslanderbehorde, a mix of brutal/authoritarian process and then entering the waiting room of your country/culture and there is a shock of encountering familiarity and the past – a link of time; present and past. Interested in researching rhythm of movements and gestures, repetition, tempo.

Reyna: the ritualistic aspects of painting, circular dances, philosophical questions around time –  how choreographies and movement engage with the space/time dimension. And inspired by the theme of the São Paulo Biennale 2023 Choreographies of the impossible and how this theme speaks to our work

Kinga: that every culture has a circle dance; the absurdity of the Burger Amt and how it represents Bingo Halls – numbers being called out, numbers projected onto screens, the gamble of your Termin number, the bingo of your visa – the absurdity of the amt as a time warp, stuck in time.

photos: Ghazal Samra Alhamwi and Zamakan Team