Here I am alone, I am the only one who hears or sees or experiences in this spaceship that is my one room studio. The image of the swan in my video repeats, divides, evaporates and echoes itself, like me as an artist still participating in many ways across the world wide web. I guess the work with the spider’s web, Without Ceremony, also becomes my reference to a physical web becoming a semiotics of the virtual web. As the days pass, I watch my plants grow, there are things I never really noticed or paid attention to - the way the leaves are born, one by one, they unwind, the texture is glossy and new like the moist skin of a newborn or the inside of my own mouth, with tiny plant arteries wrapping around and carrying nutrients.
I began a series of collaborations with the Algerian musician, Adjeneg Abbas, who lives now in Paris, and whom I met in Tiferdoud two years ago during the Raconte Arts Festival in Kabylie, a mountainous region of Algeria. I sent him the link to my video of the spider’s web and he created the music, then I put everything together for the video entitled, Without Ceremony. I sent him some video from when I first visited Hungary, a few years ago, of a swan in the famous Lake Balaton. I had been inspired by a film by another artist of a swan and I wanted to express how I was feeling at this time, the way living in a digital world became a sense of deterioration of self, a mimicking of me in reality, the name of the video is One Swan’s Way, a play on the writings by Marcel Proust in his well known, Remembrance of Things Past- Swann’s Way (Marcel Proust , À la recherche du temps perdu. Du côté de chez Swann, where the connection to memory and how it is evoked by a physical experience of taste or smell is highlighted). The addition of Adjeneg’s music with both videos allows me to maintain my connection to Algeria, the sound of the instruments brings me back to the sense of solidarity I feel with the Algerian artists who I have maintained contact with over the years. With the music, they are here with me and I feel their sense of solidarity with all of our efforts to keep going, keep dreaming, keep believing that everything we do as an artist is worth it whether it affects change, appreciation, or connection now or in a future distant or near.