Like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep

by Joud Al-Tamimi

How do we attune to the multiscalar relations and networks that constitute the planetary? How is refusal performed across different scales of space and time? What kind of methodologies and aesthetic strategies disrupt the temporal ghettos of imperial capitalism? How do we thicken time and stay in this space of immanence?

Exploring intersections between technopolitics, geology and more-than-human relations, like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep is a gesture towards temporalisation and the interscalar as modes of thinking the political, a witnessing from within and against catastrophe that connects histories and scales otherwise kept asunder; from the microbial to the cosmic.

Gamers, developers, proletarian urbanists, bots, fish, bacteria and ghosts are amongst a polyphony of characters summoned here as infiltrators traversing disparate spacetimes: the dream, the real, the virtual, the celestial. Moments of reckoning with the colonial and its attendant intertemporal crises are met with varied enactments of fabulation, worldbuilding and dehiscence- a wound that ruptures, infecting the colonial enterprise with lines of flight that conjure what is otherwise.  

Across the different works, we encounter a world that is and a world that is not yet, an assemblage of sounds and images that underscores an attempt at opening up a science fiction of the present.

Joud Al-Tamimi is an artist and curator based between Amman and Berlin. She worked at Darat al Funun from 2019-2021, where she directed The Lab program and curated the trilogy: Internet of Things: Another World is Possible, Measuring Life: Notes Toward an Impossible Exchange and Postcolonial Ecologies. More recently, she founded Asphalt, a platform for self-organized study, research and artistic production. Her work grapples with epistemic violence, insurgent economies, anticolonial imaginaries and psychoanalysis.

With moving image works by Firas Shehadeh, PoHao Chi, HSURAE and Nancy Valladares, Jonathas de Andrade, Raqs Media Collective, Shuruq Harb, Aarti Sunder, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour, Mohamed Abdelkarim, Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson (Pejvak) and Daniel Nivón.