Instructions for Placemaking: Blue Gaze at The Future, Episode #2
19:30–21:00
de Appel, Tolstraat 160, Amsterdam
Blue Gaze at the Future, Episode #1: The Apparitions of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma
About Blue Gaze at The Future, Episode #2: Designing the Unseen: A Rehearsal by Mohamed Abdelkarim
Blue Gaze at the Future is a series of audiovisual performances combining text, radio drama, and visuals. It questions the theater stage as a landscape that can reorder fractured reality, proposing a different world. The performance follows the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, known for her clairvoyance, tracing her appearances in literature post-1948. It explores future hope amidst grief and defeat. In this second episode, the desert is the focus — both as a physical and metaphorical landscape — considering how it can be staged scenographically.
About Our People are Our Mountains: Instructions for Placemaking
In Our People are Our Mountains (quoting from Amílcar Cabral’s words on the Guinea-Bissau's liberation movement), artists and collectives in Palestine and elsewhere who work on questions around land from different perspectives, collaborate with majelis (assembly) Jakarta by sending instructions remotely. Utilizing instructions, rather than physically transferring works or facilitating travel, stems from ethical, political, and environmental considerations. The act of sending instructions is also a way to point to the physical and symbolic distances, particularly emphasizing the profound difficulties associated with moving in and out of Palestine, especially during the ongoing genocide. This initiative, therefore, is an act of transmission and trust—artists will transmit their creative directives to counterparts in Jakarta, who will, in turn, realize, contribute to, perform, or enact the instructions in place.
In the Amsterdam iteration, the instructions will be presented, whereas some of them will be activated throughout the coming weeks. Every week of the presentation span, a new video by the participating artists and others will be screened on loop for one full exhibition week. In addition a programme of performances, workshops and gatherings will take place throughout the project span. The audiovisual performance Blue Gaze at The Future, Episode #2: Designing the Unseen: A Rehearsal by Mohamed Abdelkarim with Fay is part of this program
Bio
Mohamed Abdelkarim is a visual artist, performer and cultural producer. In Abdelkarim's performative works, the script bears witness to the research experience. The emphasis is on the process, as a non-linear reflection on production and cultural genealogy. His current umbrella project focuses on the agency of the landscape as a witness to ‘a history we missed and a future we have not yet attended’.
