Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

At a time before time, a Big Bang in Babel sat the uni-logos into a perpetual process of language breeding. Depleted and stripped of its initial inertia, language can no longer keep up, and slowly crumbles to phonetic fragments of ghostly meaning. Dialect-ic-s coalesce, and separates overlap. Accidentally excavated, scraps of mental images that outlived history are crunched into an associative mash. No-longer-indigenous tongues exercise “language games” of syntactic deconstruction, morphing seemingly heterogeneous linguistic signs until foreign words resettle in newly-found ears. Persistent utterances in Bal-balah (befuddlement/ clutter/ Babelising) show no mercy for hesitation or stuttering; in this framework there is no place for affective becoming, yet at the same time, the loss of the power fossilized in words opens up a space of flexibility to ascribe new and elusive meanings.

Mohamed A. Gawad is an editor and a filmmaker based in Cairo. He holds an MFA in scriptwriting and editing from RSICA. His works were screened in several festivals and spaces including Berlinale, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Shnit Film Festival, Contemporary Image Collective - Cairo, and Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques. He is also a co-founder of Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center.