Hold The Line #1
Performance with Ahmed Mohsen Mansour
Zurich Switzerland 2018
Daily life contains many events which are forming our life, events that are part of our life, effects and we created it. Some other events we don’t remember, as much it's repeated in our routine daily life as much it’s not important. It might take a long time every day, but we do not realize, some events like air.
Ahmed Mohsen Mansour and Yara Mekawei, artists from Cairo, Egypt. Perform the part of their own perspective of the meaning of time in their daily lives, and the other events of wasting time they have.
This project is a performance dialogue between Mekawei and Mansour, in which they use live elements to talk to each other; Mansour uses objects to describe this thought in parallel with the live sound art of Mekawei. They do it practically by asking the audience to be part of the show, The performance starts with a survey containing a question about time: What time does it mean for you? Mansour is distributed to the audience, asking them to answer in 5 minutes.
This project is presented in three parts, The first part is (No Time For Video); “Recently I didn't get much more time to express myself or create a new artwork because of a lot of daily struggles, life events, and our requirements, so I decided to open my video cam and start shooting anything through my day trying to reflect how much apathetic and routine could deliver anyone to this case.
Mansour cut the onion on the paper of the survey, his profile photo; at that time, Mekawei took the live sounds of what he making and manipulated them using a microphone and analog synth.
During Mansour's finish of the first part, Mekawei starts the second part of the performance, where she drinks water from the cup, but do not swallow it, she throws it in a large glass vessel that has a lot of paper that contains all the ideas that they have in their daily lives.
In the final part of the show, Mansour spread all the paper on a rope in the showroom, all the paper that was used in the performance, after its destruction, all the ideas, and all the answers of the audience.
This project about apathy is a lack of feeling, emotion, interest, and concern. Apathy is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation, and/or passion. An apathetic individual has an absence of interest in or concern about emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical, and/or physical life and the world.”