Back to Present

Back to Present discusses the themes, filming structure, and editing process of the short film A Day Becomes (2018). The film is part of Guava, a platform for art-actions that promotes the idea of free movement and the removal of borders east of the Mediterranean. In this exposition and in making the film, I explore the possibilities of political imagination regarding regional movement across borders in relation to the phenomenon of Time. The exposition has two parts. The first, entitled Here, unfolds around discussion about the landscape; the second, called Now, suggests that how time is experienced can affect how one experiences one’s surroundings. The form of the texts correlates to the content, form, and making of the film. The film making text is set in the center of the exposition, and the other discussions push themselves in and spread over the page. Like the text, the film’s continuous timeline is dense and loaded with plural repetitions and conversations. The interlaced reflections and commentaries that characterize the text echo Yousef’s layered performance of time in the film. With its layout and content, the exposition explores the film’s structure and embodied experience of the landscape through time: it is a way to rethink and re-feel the Here of this region through the lingering Now of the film. This exposition was developed from my PhD thesis at the PhDArts program, Leiden University