To feel oneself, to feel the otherness;
Partly in, Partly out.
A garden in constant metastasis allowing evanescent openings to be felt and be experienced
as flowers bloom yet also fade away.

Gardens have always been regarded as ideal places that remind us of the balanced relationship between humans and nature. The classical interpretation of the garden has been that of a lush and abundant place where passion, desire, pleasure and a manifold of other sensations harmoniously coexist. Apart from its glorified and romanticized connotations, gardens have simultaneously been materializations of purely anthropocentric actions, unveiling a reality of greediness, emotional impoverishment, and ecological injustice towards the Earth, the humans and non-human others. What was before regarded as a utopian ecosystem has now been turned into a terrain of bodies in pain and souls in grief, where even some elements of welfare here and there fail to disguise the strong presence of contemporary micro-dystopias.

Chaos and order, fantasy and reality, utopia and dystopia, gratification and pain, lust and aversion glide from one to the other in an endless interplay of manifestations, inclusions and exclusions. The Garden depicts a primal sonic universe in which the desires of being, the tensions in the becoming and serenity take turns in no chronological order and in which each sound allegorically originates from a library of voiced sounds, such as audible breathing and other nonlinguistic utterances connected to intimate communication.
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Farah Hazim is a french-lebanese intermedia artist and composer; she investigates experimental and improvised forms of sound art, and explores alternative inquiries into hearing, listening and experiencing with a particular interest in multi-channel environments. Her compositions and performances proceed with a certain slowness and a semblance of repetition in the exploration of intermediate states, allowing states’ deployment in order to let the listener inhabit an atmospheric and textured soundscape in which sound-collage hunts tunes, and sometimes protocols lead the way.
In installations, her work has been turning towards plural narratives and time-based collaborative projects, creating a platform that tackles the way we understand reality of media and interconnectivity. Superposing and extracting different live streamed events or pre-recorded sound capsules, and concentrating them in a temporary media space, in which things accumulate and dissipate. Desireful of building temporary links and opening spaces for aesthetic interaction between different territories, geographical regions and temporalities in a complexity of “superimposed territories and intertwined histories”. (E. Saïd, 1977)

Farah Hazim - The garden

Spaces of Faux Intimacies is the first part of a series of interventions unfolding over a year, exploring intimacy in the wake of socially distanced capitalism, digital technologies and the pandemic. 

Today’s neoliberal, hyper-connected society, has capitalised the very notion of intimacy. Screened semblances of emotional abundance are promised to us within only a few swipes away while corporate conglomerates are profiting from our desire for physical and emotional connections. As the pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures are driving us even further apart, and amid the already existing turbulence around the world, how can we work together to produce new channels of care, social resilience, and affective solidarity? 

"Spaces of faux intimacies" brings together artists of various disciplines to contribute to the discussion with individually commissioned auditory works.

Curated by Katerina Gnafaki for Centrum

The exhibition is part of the Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festival 2021 and made possible with the generous support of Musikfonds, by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.