Tommorow I'll give birth to a fish
performance / video
with Amal Khlif (poems in Arabic - English subtitles)
video installation : Sabine Burchard
Amal Khlif's poems are like a backwash: a cluster of themes come and go in variations: the unborn child or the unborn dead child; fear as a garment of skin passed down from mother to daughter; devouring, interchangeable mothers, distraught seamstresses; the abyssal womb with its starry wall where colorful fish swim. These interweavings weave an organic world: darkness with explosions of color, melancholy with bursts of childhood, profoundly feminine to the point of revolt.
While the usual labels - feminism, post-colonialism, trauma-resilience, tradition-modernity... - obviously apply, they flatten the strong singularity of these texts: a few obsessive and highly personal images are made and unmade, appear, disintegrate, recombine and are reborn always the same and always different, in a dreamlike flow of striking images.
For Tommorow I'll give birth to a fish, Amal is alone on stage, as if at the heart of a generative matrix whose own voice activates the appearance of images created by young Swiss video artist Sabine Burchard.
Sabine animates a visual universe echoing Amal's poems, unraveling the elementary threads of the poems' images, which she will then reweave into other images, and sew, unstitch and restitch in a slow or agitated tide of waves.
Alongside the poetess, the viewer plunges into this sea of unstable but insistent images that never cease to imprint the persistent figures of the poems on the retina.
It's a real dive, a gentle, acidic apnoea into very personal, yet subtly connected oceans-universes, with occasional invigorating strokes of the flippers to escape the moray eel of melancholy and get closer to shimmering coral.
Sabine Burchard
Scenographer / 3D Animator / Designer / Director, Sabine Burchard was born in Brig-Glis in the Valais region of Switzerland in 1997. After studying at the Lucerne Design & Art University of Applied Sciences, she focused on animation and video design for live events and installations. With projections, she transforms building facades, theater and concert stages, rooms and places in nature. She has shown installations at festivals such as Licht Festival Lucerne, Murten Festival and Festival of Animation in Berlin, See Djerba in Tunisia. Projects with artists are particularly important to her, such as the video design for “Tout le monde” attend” at the Hofpielhaus Munich or for the drama ‘Ausgesprochen ich’ at the Theater Luzern.
