SCATTERED SEA – Installation

Scattered Sea is an immersive, multi-channel video installation that confronts the aesthetics and geopolitics of fragmentation, displacement, hybridity and belonging across postcolonial landscapes.

Situated within an experimental, speculative framework, the installation transforms the space into a site of spatial and temporal rupture. Comprising five white shallow water basins shaped in conceptual ornaments, the space is bisected by three white suspended semi-transparent veils, onto which a 41-minute synchronized film loops continuously. The viewer is not a passive observer, but a mobile presence moving fluidly through the installation—between projection, reflection, and rupture—becoming part of an ever-shifting spatial and sensorial encounter.

Filmed across Morocco, Malta and Germany, the work features 17 performers of North African and European descent interact and relate to each other, as they inscribe and unsettle space. Through their presence and minimal gestures, they create hybrid spaces of action, intertwining slowly, allowing closeness, retrieving distance. Symbols are traced and deconstructed; space is negotiated, questioned, written with sand, as performers roam through ruins, gardens and urban streets. Boundaries are felt, blurred and redrawn. The search for traces transforms into the placing of traces. Seemingly aimless wandering leads to the sea, which repeatedly eludes them.

In a Magical Realist moment, during an endless transition of twilight, new islands are built between the continents, as sand is scattered and shaped on the sea’s surface. The cool vastness of the water meets the giant touch of warm, vulnerable hands building new territory — a hybrid space situated between constructed geographies and fluid timescapes.

Scattered Sea operates within the discursive framework of speculative futures, situating the work within a critical rethinking of historiography, where such approaches disrupt linear temporalities and open space for alternative modes of history-making and the reimagining of social and aesthetic imaginaries attuned to plural futures. In doing so, the installation seeks to reframe dominant historical narratives and interrogate hegemonic power structures. Drawing on artistic research as a method of historical and social inquiry, the work explores how performative, spatial, and cinematic languages can generate counter-hegemonic spatial imaginaries and modes of social coexistence in an increasingly plural and contested world. The installation resists the closure of linear narratives and instead offers associative, poetic structures as counter-strategies for imagining futures outside of colonial temporality and binary world orders.

The project is deeply informed by the political and historical frictions between the MENA region and Europe, particularly in light of the Mediterranean’s layered colonial legacies and contested migratory trajectories. Tangier, the main filming site—once drawn into German geopolitical ambitions and, centuries earlier, a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition—echoes with histories of displacement and refuge.

Performative sequences alternate with documentary instants, irritated by Magical Realist insertions. Scattered Sea invokes Edouard Glissant’s poetics of opacité, engaging with the aesthetics of ungraspability, fragmentation, and multiplicity. Instead of resolution, it opens a space for encounter—between histories, futures, bodies, and geographies—that is as fragile as it is resistant.

The sea recurs mutable, borderless, and indifferent. In the liminal twilight, looping continuously between day and night, new islands are imagined. As theorized by Hannah Arendt,’Natalität’ (natality)—the capacity to begin anew—subvertedly, softly infuses space. Scattered Sea ultimately becomes a connecting gesture toward that beginning amid fracture; an insistence on possibility.