Elusive were the words of poetess Al-Khansa, whose full name was Tumāḍhir bint ‘Amr ibn Al Harith Ibn Sharid. This ability of the language to recompose and in its genius, as a kind of tormented wildness where the words escaped each time the meaning and the perceived. There was thus "a movement of nostalgic, mournful lyricism to reserve, perhaps encode, in short to render both accessible and inaccessible[1] the sense of its words.
The word was the matter for Alia Sellami and Nicène Kossentini. They walked through a reading path, side by side and Tumāḍhir was their third. They were in the pursuit of an experience, of a journey, they ruminated around a magnetic field where the words orbited around a vibration and a frequency. The verb in action expresses its state whilst it unfolds to the rhythm of the voice tone or the expression of a thought.
From the feminine, they were able to extract the essence of the expression to invite these various aesthetic and sensory experiences. Seeking various possibilities to retrieve the thin line between the threshold of the tangible and the perceptible through the voice, the tone, the repetition, the composition, and the meanings of the reading.
"Being at the limit: these words do not yet form a proposition, let alone a discourse. But there is there, provided that one plays of it, of what to generate more or less."[2] The poetic experience through a language open to interpretation, to a musicality of a fertile ground of the imaginary of those perceiving it.
Plural, such was the qualifier of the verb. It brings together distinct temporalities freed from the formal constraints and multiplied to give an alter sense. The verb becomes, a state or a plastic expression as a performative kind. The word is put into action and reaches you by a gesture, sometimes repetitive, written or heard.
Like a life journey, Kossentini and Sellami were able to pursue what these words had to offer in the quest of "the literary character of the text, which is inscribed on the side of the intentional object, in its noematic structure, one could say, and not only on the subjective side of the noetic act. "[3]
The process was interwoven with ante-Islamic poetry, which served as a breeze to tickle the artists' senses to essentially extract an existence of its own from each verb. They began thus to think a language in movement.
They worked with the spoken, rehearsed, mouthed, spelled language and at the same time intensified, as a material that ruled the work by directing Nicene's hand in her visual compositions and Alia's breath to sing her words.
In total harmony, both led the orchestra. They composed, sometimes taking over the reins by intuition, to the same degree of sensitivity and synchronicity.
Step by step, Kossentini and Sellami let themselves be guided by what the words made them undergo and communicate to them the matter of the plethora of possibilities in perceiving the reading journey of a word.
From a thought, they accessed the language through the sensory that led to a common root that could grow different branches, graphically and what it conveyed vocally as a meaning.
The sound is lived and sensed just like the written word, black on white, or what could be qualified as “the metaphysical exchange, the circular complicity of the metaphors of the eye and the ear. "[4]
Tumadhir's Walk is an exhibition that brings together the movement of poetry, the essence of poetics, the sound and a meeting point of plastic and performative expressions that found their way through vibratory terms and channels. The word becomes matter, gesture, a life span and a musicality that has no limit to arouse the senses and to attain them.
Salma Kossemtini, Tunis, November 2022
[3]Derrida,J. (1992) Acts of litterature, Routledge, p44
[4] Derrida,J. (1972), Margins of philosophy, the University of Chicago, p13
