MELISA YAGMUR SAYDI // melagro

Artist & Filmmaker


A stain of light on my screen, traveling down

through your pixels (2024)


Audiovisual performance and poetry - 30 minutes



The performance was presented in Antwerp, beneath the monumental domes of ExtraCity, a former church converted into an art space, as part of Out of Sight’s Close Encounters program. It was the result of a 1.5-month residency at MORPHO (organized by Salt & MHKA) on audiovisual performance.




A stain of light on my screen, traveling down through your pixels, is a 30-minute-long audiovisual performance. It displays a constant process of visual integration and disintegration, where live footage, animation clips, DIY feedback, and synthesis effects blend into each other through a mapped MIDI controller.







Two characters, removed from their original videographic contexts, reappear repeatedly during the performance. Lines from a poem dedicated to these anonymous characters appear on screen in sequence.  The poem describes the artist's coincidental encounters with them, noting how, stripped of identity, their digital images now serve as narrative and compositional elements. A live sound environment, created with video-triggered sound effects and a synthesizer, accompanies the meditative process.

As the instrument that illuminates the night and forms images in the darkness,  the streetlight had a symbolic place in the universe of the performance. I recognized it as an enabler of videographic imagination, just like the beamer, granting access to the scenes and bodies that later gain poetic meaning on screen. Its image recurred during the performance, in animations and in the footage I had gathered during city nightwalks. A small lamp, resembling a streetlight, illuminated my setup.

Overall, the performance examined my relationship with media as a video artist perpetually archiving her surroundings, questioning how meaning is ascribed to recorded material and how memory is structured. The constant flux, fragmentation and pixelation served as poetic tools, and conveyed a metaphor for how memory constructs itself by continually rebuilding, interpreting, and altering lived experience.





This booklet combines additional lines of text and graphic works, with scenes and poetry from the performance. Just as in the performance itself, it reveals a fluid transformation of the digital image. Copies of this print were available to take home after the performance.

Digital print, 15 pages, 7,4 x 10,5 cm




Close Encounters & Closing Sessions, Extra City - October 2024 - Antwerp, Belgium