The Dreamer Dreams 2024
Can You Hear the Djinn in the Trees? is an experimental stopmotion animation and is intended to be the first installment of a larger series of the same name. The first volume follows five characters in a mythical valley of a long-gone era, hidden in the mountains of the Arabian Peninsula. The series exists within a rich tapestry of symbolism, inanimate objects, and wonderful, strange characters and creatures. The story echos the poetic nature of Bedouin oral storytelling as well as reassembles and restructures several plots from Pre-Islamic Arabian folklore, while the visual aesthetics are drawn from various indigenous, mythological, anthropological, and archaeological references of Arabian cultures.
Analepsis of the green shelter
Ever since the beginning of time, we have prized the opportunity of bending nature to our will. Through this action we deludedly thought to have controlled a sliver of our lives in the chaos of existence. For millennia, farmers and gardeners without any knowledge of genetics have used this forced breeding to bring out plant traits that are new and useful for humans. This “Artificial Selection” is clear evidence of the Human’s ever present need to attempt to have control over nature.
An ideal illustration lies in the concept of “The Garden”, whereby human’s taming of plants, and meticulous architectural green designs are all man-made. Our race has always had a superfluous and unusual need for a link to gardens. So why do we humans feel so drawn to the enclosure of outdoor space? Is it because horticulture is so healing?
The garden has long simultaneously been a familiar part of the home but also echoes a distant connection to the wild. Therefore, engendering an analepsis to our early indigenous ancestors who inhabited nature and nature inhabited them.
Presented upon your gaze is an arrangement of customized foliage and landscapes that create our personal histories and stories. The way the garden is created and assembled, from colour pallets to the distortion of shapes, spaces and plants can reflect and mirror One’s beliefs, philosophies, politics, religions and emotions. Consequently, we choose to occupy nature/garden both real and imaginary- One becomes the Other.
These gardens may be as far away from reality as Eden, or as near as our own backyard. However,these green shelters in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, undeniably stand as restorative, nourishing, and necessary havens whereby poetry, art, desires, love and culture come to bloom and secrets come to eternally rest.
Gardens bestow upon us the privilege to momentarily escape the inexorable vices and grimes of humanity, and to immerse oneself in a bewitching yet distorted Manufactured approach to Mother Nature.