Raed Yassin, Humming in Abandoned Places, 2020
360° video with soundtrack
With Kathy Alberici, Lorenza Izquerdo Aparicio, marina Cyrino, Matthias Koole, Elisabetta Lanfredini
Cinematography: Karim Ghossein
Sound: Diane Barbé
Assistant: Raisa Hagiu
Editor: Dom Dowbekin
Special thanks to Monira Al Qadiri
A personal act, almost secretive, humming is an act performed for our own selves in personal space, consciously or in passing, often without intending to project its sound to the outside world. It is a device to look inwards, to reflect on memories and feelings we cannot describe or illustrate in words. Humming is nostalgia, innocence and lack of clarity rolled into one medium: the secret sound of uncertainty.
In Humming in Abandoned Places, a group of scattered people perform dissonant humming set within and around Germany’s first lung hospital. These places were chosen in Autumn 2020 by Yassin to represent the relentlessness of the passing of time, but also to simultaneously predict the dark image of an apocalyptic future. What we are living through in the current moment depicted through acts of doubt: the disconnection between people, the forced inwardness of isolation, and the fear of others are phenomena that betray our natural instincts as individual humans and make us retreat from our sense of togetherness in the world. Together with this series of performances in spaces thus acts as a eulogy for this time, displaying our deep aloneness, in tension with the lack of tools at hand to desire to reconnect.
Humming in Abandoned Places was part of In The Round, a programme of performance art curated by Rose Lejeune for Abu Dhabi Art..
