Para-siting: Tempodesert

Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices is a space for contemplation and investigation into the desert as both a physical landscape, an abstract concept, and a site for speculation. Through a cluster of activities, including performative reading, public events, and mapping and diagramming workshops, Sequential Practices aims to navigate and discuss multiple performative practices approaching to the desert’s complexity.

Desert Without Sand came out of urgency to negotiate the multiplicity of the desert as a space of fugitivity, a land of resistance, as space of hermeticism, as nature, as un-nature, as site of erasure, as site of emergence, as stage for speculative futures, as memory keeper, as a map of silence and echoes, as witness, as site of grief, as myth, as home, as desert.

Friday 10 October — First Sequence
Friday 17 October — Second Sequence
Saturday 25 October — Third Sequence
Friday 31 October — Fourth Sequence

Tempodesert is a performance-based collaboration between Fay Aldhukair and Mohamed Abdelkarim, with occasional contributions from others. It emerged after experiencing the world “after 8/8,” a term coined when Fay and Abdelkarim watched The Draw of the Desert 8/8 Seminar by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani on March 15, 2024.

They operate as a performative lab, poetically exploring the holistic and layered temporalities of the desert, geological, ephemeral, eternal, and mythological. Through various mediums such as performances, plays, texts, songs, films, publications, workshops, and walks, Tempodesert seeks to investigate, reclaim, and liberate the desert from colonial narratives and imposed perceptions.

Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices was made possible by Ettijahat and CBK Rotterdam.

Scary Storytelling Night

We invite you to a scary storytelling night, presented in collaboration with Mezrab, and hosted by Sahand Sahebdivani. Come listen as a group of storytellers bring the Temper Tantrum Bonehouse to life—sending shivers down your spine and perhaps even awakening a few ghosts along the way.

At the border of our physical bodies and the shadowed side of our minds dwell creatures, spirits, and entities that are more than human—often elusive and hard to trace. Some of us have had encounters that, to others, might sound like ghost stories, while in many cultures these same experiences are seen as omens. Once such a story is shared, its survival depends on the collective. Do you hear a ghost story, or do you recognize a life lesson?

Storytellers: Nicole Santé, Ogutu Muraya, Irina Koriazova.

Walk in and soup — 18:30-19:30
Programme — 19:30-21:00

Admission: €5

Sign up via the Eventbrite page of the event.

Mezrab is an Amsterdam based platform for storytelling and an important initiator in the development of storytelling as an art form in the Netherlands. Mezrab serves as a source of inspiration for many theatres, centers, museums and festivals to program storytelling.

Photos by Jesse Vorswijk