The Maqam Practice

2 questions to Omar Rajeh from the Venice Dance Biennale

1. How does the notion of a shape-shifting time speak to your practice? (up to 200 words = 1,200 characters, including spaces)

Time is mainly understood through the shifting of space, and for this reason we automatically develop a linear understanding of it. But when space is not defined by shape or fixed form, then time no longer follows the same logic. In my practice, I do not approach space as a fixed form, but as a field of relationships that is constantly shifting. In this perspective, time grows, widens, narrows down, and builds a rhythm that is not necessarily confined to a fixed tempo. Time, in this sense, is a void measured by actions rather than forms.

1. When creating a new work, how do you engage with/experience the context of the present time that you are living through? (up to 200 words = 1,200 characters, including spaces)

I like to throw myself into the experience of doing. I see it as a continuous challenge to understand the process of building a composition while developing an accumulation of the present time. On one hand, the present moment is never isolated. It is always an outcome of past experiences, or at least in contact with them. On the other hand, it is also the moment of action, the moment from which a future composition can be imagined. What interests me is exactly this unstable condition of the present: a moment that is always vanishing, yet remains the only possible moment of encounter.