I first heard about Abdelkarim through the Traces of Elsewhere exhibition at the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival. Alongside other artists, he probed the sea as an archive of traces, a bearer of violence across globally intersecting scales. As in numerous other performances, he brought the mythological and the unseen into close conversation with that realm we so fragilely designate the ‘real’. Ghosts, demons, seers, and other renegade figures are his lodestars. Plucked out of the ancient texts and legends in which they might otherwise be entombed, they shiver back into life across Abdelkarim’s looped chronologies. They point to us, cast a shadow over our present. In their gaze the landscape itself comes to seem—to use Abdelkarim’s word—a “witness”. In its folds and geographies are encoded the memory of erasure, the overwritten script of speculation, even the textures of rapture and defeat by which a world might be undone and remade.
I was glad to correspond with him, about his approach to textuality and narrative, how it saturates everything in his practice from the figure of the nomad to the fraught notion of speculation in its enmeshment with networks of neoliberal capital. The “roving body”, as he says in one of his works about drones. But it could equally be about how stories splice together fractured timelines. “Let’s call it the future.”
—Alex Tan, Assistant Managing Editor
So much of your artistic practice moves between text and its embodiment through performance. You write and think a lot about how narratives are woven and histories told. Can you say more about what possibilities and affordances these mediums (of textuality and theatre) have opened up for you? What does the practice of ‘fictioning’ represent, and which discourses or truths are you most invested in countering?
Let me define theatre as an umbrella term encompassing a form, a history, and a research apparatus, which includes my practices of writing, working with texts, narrative and narration, and fiction as one of the elements of drama.
Since 2014—when I was first introduced to performance studies as an academic discipline, along with its theoretical and practical branches—I was captivated by its methodology and the way it views everything as performance. Thus, my interest shifted away from sensing reality and fiction as a dichotomy, moving toward the performativity of the event and its theatrical elements. Later in 2017, I came across the notion of “fictioning” in Simon O’Sullivan’s writings, which almost proposes fiction as a dialectical act that treats fiction as a gesture, not as a separate realm in contrast to reality. Therefore, I proposed fictioning as a counter-gesture to reclaim the past and speculate on our future.
The shift in how I approach the notion of fiction has significantly influenced my practice. For instance, in the performance A Gift To Those Who Contemplate The Marvels Of Renegades, I wove into the script fragments of voices that have been silenced, erased, and missed on account of the Republic of Salé—Diego Diaz, Isabelle Eberhardt, and other characters and entities. Through the performance script, I filled the gaps and fictioned a desired history as a paradigm through which to understand such contemporary issues as migration and mobility, and what it means to fall out of history.
In later work such as Gazing . . . Unseeing and Unbearable future that slips through my fingers, fiction becomes more central to the process of world-making—to create an imaginary world as an excessive model of reality, a world that resonates with the living world we know, not just to cultivate hope but to make the hope more negotiable.
One of your enduring themes seems to be migration and mobility; you engage with figures of not only the migrant but what you call the ‘renegade’. Maybe we can also add the nomad and the refugee to that lexicon. Isabelle Eberhardt shows up repeatedly, for instance, exemplifying a kind of transgressive queerness, not just along axes of gender but also in terms of national boundaries. Or the navigator Lass el-Behar, who resists human romance because he’s so enamoured of the sea and of his ship. Eventually he falls in love with a jinn and disappears beneath the ocean. You invoke this character in Let the Sea Eat Me alongside a constellation of other preoccupations. What fascinates you about border-crossing throughout time, and within our contemporary moment?
Isabelle Eberhardt, Lass el-Behar, Reis Mourad the Younger, Afoqai, and other characters: I started archiving their hearsay and tales in 2014, which is an important date for me and for people of all generations in our region. At that time, 2013–14 seemed like a closure. In the failure of the Arab uprising, several ontological questions were raised, questioning the very grounds of being: what does it mean to witness the moment of defeat and the imposed closure, what kind of self remains when the horizon of collective possibility ruptures? Does the feeling of being eternally defeated compel us to think and live beyond globally inherited values? And if so, what form of imagined ethical frameworks might emerge from this position of loss?
Which made me fascinated by the history of the Republic of Salé and other phenomena in friction with the Mediterranean basin—shaped by those expelled from other territories and communities and forced to cross the sea. These were the ones who shaped such a Republic as a system dealing with the crisis as a permanent condition.
Migration, mobility, renegading and locomoting for me are not merely biographical or political phenomena but ontological stances, which means that those conditions and circumstances cannot be reduced to identity categories, legal statuses, or geopolitical movements. Rather, they are a signal of a rupture with the esoteric coordinates of the dominant world, a refusal to accept the closure imposed on them.
What also fascinates me about the renegade, the nomad, the mystic is that their tales reveal a critical gap of revolting against a dominant system, which most of the time leads to and creates another scheme of systems that follow the same grid. This usually occurred in revolutions, uprisings, or resistance movements, but in the renegades' case, they do not seek to be reabsorbed into a system; rather, they seek an existential drift away from fixed meaning and settled notions. Since starting this endeavor, I have found a long-term interest in the moment where the mythological and the material converge in the case of the renegade mystic, as well as in other cases, like Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma.
I admire how geographically situated and specific your work is: your artist bio, too, emphasizes that landscape is a “witness to a history we missed and a future we have not yet attended”. Different topographies—I’m thinking mainly of the ocean and the desert—feature prominently across your oeuvre. How do you think about landscape and geography in relation to time (whether conceptualized as an unending continuum, or something moving in a certain direction)? To what extent does space (or the natural world) function as an archive in your art?
I am fundamentally interested in narrative and narration. The question of whether history, as a narrative, has an end and a beginning. Does it repeat itself? The relationship to the past, its consequences, and the interrogation of time and narrative have been floating over my practices for a long time. I haven’t settled on a solid stance or position towards time and its politics. This uncertainty about the notion of time has also been influenced by the changing events around me, such as regional and sometimes global conflicts, which are often attributed to and viewed as part of a continuous historical conflict. Others are highly specific to particular geographies, and some are ultimately intertwined with modern technology and contemporary elements.
All of these questions lead me to think of time contextually, and, of course, all that is associated with time—such as history, narrative, and the future, among others. A plurality of concepts, where multiple futures, histories, and destinies coexist in even one society or geography. To elaborate further, I would borrow a concept from Federico Campagna, who views time through the lens of narration. Narration has a beginning and an end; when narration begins, a time segment also begins, creating a discontinuity with its past. This past becomes the future of the previous segment. Similarly, the end of one of these segments (or worlds) creates a discontinuity with what comes after, which becomes the past of a new segment.
Landscapes, for me, are a place where this course of continuity and discontinuity becomes visible. The landscape is the material element of this segment. Returning to the imposed closure that we witnessed in 2013 in Egypt, we can further detect this approach to time in the regime’s attempts to alter the landscape from Egypt before 2013 to create a discontinuity with what was there before—as if to impose closure, to reorder and reorganize the landscape and mark the discontinuity. This is clearly evident in the projects established by the regime from day one of the military coup: the physical relocation of the capital from Cairo to the gated New Capital compound in the middle of the desert. Landmarks have been systematically replaced or had their histories erased, exemplified by the whitewashing of Rabaa Square’s name (where the eponymous massacre took place) into that of the first General Prosecutor after the coup. Other urban and real estate development projects, too, are altering the landscape.
And going back to what I mentioned about my skepticism of identity categories (by “identity,” I refer to national, historically situated civilizational identities, rather than identities based on gender or race), to prevent this historically rooted identity, I find geography to be more material than the question of identity when it comes to global conflicts of power. Geography is where political positions are performed and aligned.
In pieces I’ve done, like Gazing . . . Unseeing and Lost Gazes (a speculative fiction short story), the landscape is a witness to disaster, displacement, and infrastructural power. The city, the desert, and the river are not only natural terrains, but also a geography of historical violence and a point at which futures uncertainly intersect. Across both works, land and water contain sediments of narratives that are interrupted and reconfigured by speculative fiction.
There is, in Unbearable future that slips through my fingers, a strand in your script that associates the act of narrative with counter-speculation. Speculation is such a loaded term, especially in an era of neoliberal capital, it seems, and one might even argue that it bears genealogical and aesthetic affinities with fraught trajectories of colonialism and slavery, when racialized bodies became literal commodities to be exchanged and sold. But we’ve also seen, in recent times, the ascendancy of a genre known as ‘speculative fiction’. Where do you situate your creative practice amidst these tensions that the notion of ‘speculation’ encodes? What crosses your mind when you’re conjuring a speculative future into being? Is there anything you make it a point to highlight or to avoid?
If we agree that we live within a world of multiple realities—multiple worlds—and that this plurality comes from geographical, economic, infrastructural, and other material elements, then the differences in speculating on the future depend on the position regarding and within those elements. Let me share a sentence I like from an artist friend, spoken during a moment when I started to become interested in speculative fiction—or the futurability of fiction—after I had been working with fiction for a decade. After COVID in particular, I became increasingly preoccupied by thoughts about the end of the world(s), which sparked my interest in the notion of future(s). I was speaking with my artist friend, Mostafa Elbaroody, about what we find problematic in some speculative fiction—especially that produced in Europe and the United States, which often presents a highly abstract and ungrounded model of the future. He said that speculative fiction as a genre is inherently abstract and hypothetical; when its abstraction becomes too self-contained and detached from material and political reality, its cognitive estrangement becomes nothing but a creative exercise or ornamental escape.
In the work Unbearable future that slips through my fingers, I’ve been contemplating, at once, regional projects under different regimes in Egypt’s history since the Second World War and how the state has envisioned the future within global changes in power dynamics. On the other hand, I was negotiating what kind of counter-speculation is needed to resist the dominant speculation. In my practice, speculative fiction is contextual even when we face planetary questions, in the sense that all the global crises and disasters are shaped by specific particularities. Explicitly, as we speak, there are different projects speculating about the Middle East—imperialist speculations over what is defined as “The New Middle East Project”—and it’s being countered, explained, and resisted through re-narrating a narrative that has been settled.
In my performance work Oh, I Am So Sorry! I Didn’t Mean To Scratch Your Face, the Ghoul appears under different names, including Jinni, Ifrit, and Ashkif. However, one description portrays it as an ugly creature that threatens the daily life and stability of the Royal Court. Although other antagonists appear in the narrative, the ghoul remains the major antagonist. The theme of ugliness recurs throughout the story; the people in general, and the princess in particular, become frightened merely by seeing its face when the princess describes the ghoul's ugliness from the perspective of normative aesthetic standards upheld by those in positions of power and authority. For me, the depiction of the ghoul in One Thousand and One Nights is not only a myth, but bears a striking resemblance to the figure later identified by the oppressor in the twentieth century as the “terrorist”.
You draw inspiration from many sources, and frequently look toward myth and legend, and sometimes toward the classical Arabic tradition. There’s A Thousand and One Nights for instance, which you invoke as an instance—perhaps an exemplar—of perspectival instability and multiplicity. I want to ask more specifically about the figure of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, whom you gloss in Blue Gaze at the Future as “a woman who lived in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula and was known for her exceptional intuition, sharp eyesight, clairvoyance, and ability to predict events before they occurred”. In what ways did you mobilize this tale to resonate with a post-1967 affect of defeat and melancholy? More broadly, why do you turn to mythology to understand catastrophe (whether in the past or future)?
I believe that myth is not a story or cultural legacy, but a mode of thought and a refuge for finding and depositing different paradigms in a world where meaning has collapsed and global values have withdrawn. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, myth allows us to embody a truth that transcends logic, sequence, and fact. The act of turning to myth, far from cherishing the myth itself, has to do with thinking of the myth as an act of cosmogony, which I see as a world-making process. Contemplating the myth allows me to think about its implications in worlding, including rapture, defeat, mourning, and refusal.
The connection between Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma and the aftermath of defeat in general, especially the 1967 Naksa, has been influential as a source of inspiration in poetry within the Arabic-speaking region. Around the end of May 1967, just a few days after the Naksa or the “day of the setback,” Zarqāʾ appeared to a young Egyptian poet named Amal Dunqul. Amal Dunqul narrates his encounter with Zarqāʾ in a poem titled “Crying Between the Hands of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma”. In this poem, Dunqul embodies the figure of Antarah, the black pre-Islamic Arab knight and poet who—despite being born into slavery—earned glory for his tribe. Unfortunately, he was never recognized as a knight or a free man.
Dunqul depicts Antarah not in his moments of heroism but in a state of vulnerability and defeat, crying in the hands of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma. He stages this encounter as a prologue to the legendary moment associated with Zarqāʾ: the final act of her myth. Despite her tribe’s reliance on her extraordinary vision to detect threats and protect their land, they dismissed her last warning when she observed trees moving on the horizon. They assumed she was delusional and ignored her plea. The enemy soon arrived, concealed within tree trunks, and carried out a brutal massacre. Zarqāʾs eyes were torn out, and she was crucified. At this moment, Amal Dunqul in Antarah’s body falls down dispossessed, broken, weeping, and wounded.
