Ramblings On Survival (In progress)
Video - Around 5 minutes
This is a short animation planned to be shown in OVNi Videoart Biennale, Nice in 2026. The animation takes place in 2025, when the horror in Gaza is being live-streamed to the world, without any intervention. Tech autocrats like Elon Musk are gaining more and more power. And on a daily basis, we are exposed to their buffoonery and displays of power. In addition to this, my brain is completely lost in my own chaos of unemployment, career pursuit, emails and applications. My imagination is damaged, it now reminds me of a broken computer. In this piece, I create a dreamlike landscape of this increasingly uncertain context, while developing a new visual style, moving from collage to a more graphic approach.
I started the video in Nice at the OVNI residency. At the time, Musk was constantly in the news, and Trump had announced his dream of turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Meanwhile, I had just arrived from the Middle East to the French Riviera to do a residency in a luxurious hotel. During that period, I was also stepping back from activism, and in the 2nd week of the residency, I left the activist collective I had co-founded in 2020. Emerged during that period when I was leaving activism and struggling with unemployment while fascism and violence were on the rise, this intimate work examines the balance between protecting oneself and others, and what 'survival' means in a neoliberal world.
