Interactive "Weaving a North African Rug with the Human Voice"

                

 Interactive Installation inviting the public to sing into the microphone using Max Msp with Jitter.

Virtual Berber motif rug animated by the interactive voice of the public. Navigating a 3d animation with the voice gives more active participatory presence for the public. Navigating what one watches is a more empowering and active experience with the projected film. Archetype images inspired by Berber motifs, come forth and transform themselves while the guest continues to 'sound out' into the microphone.  A relationship is established between the person and the new media object.  (Presented in the USA, Turkey and France.) 

Interactive "I May not Know your Language but I Know your Heart"

                 

Interactive 3d animation projected onto a hanging canvas behind which I move to animate it with my body and voice. Maya software, and Max Msp were used to create this piece.

Inspired by Berber rug weavings, this project represents a woman weaving her own life into the universe. 
(Performed in New York, Boston, Tulsa, and Ankara.)

Moving Painting "L'Interdite, Composition #1"

This animation began with a story board of 15 sketches, which I painted, representing light frequencies of an imagined body of emotion. These water color sketches were recreated in Photoshop and animated into 3d forms using Maya software.  I then watched it and found sounds and vocal frequencies to go with it. This 3d animation was inspired by the emotion of love described in Malika Mokedems's novel: "L'Interdite" where a woman expresses her loss for her loved one.
This project translated the light and sound frequency I imagined to portray the moving body of the emotion she felt at her loss. 
(Exhibited as a moving painting in Mobius Boston, New York, at Dulcinea Istanbul, Bilkent Ankara, Etna Paris, "Neme festival" Russia, Beaux Arts Algiers.)

Coffee grind animation with song

                           

Much of Turkish oral culture has developed itself through story telling by 'reading' the fortune of a friend in the residues of coffee grind left on the inside of the cup. This animation was inspired by a true coffee cup reading from my friend Nimet in Ankara, Turkey. 

'Film Sauvage'

"Intimate Letters to Algeria" 62 minutes film

         I practice 'film sauvage' filmmaking by gathering pieces of film from my life to make it into an audio visual composition. I combined 16 mm film with ntsc and pal video footage which I shot and gathered between 1997 to 2010.

This is the story of an identity search through others, a voyage in the timescape of my personal film footage and voyage across other continents to better understand what it means to be algerian, or not. To understand the fear of being, the fear of being rejected, the fear of rejecting, and finally the love and attachement to this request. Across France, USA, Turkey, Laos and back again to France to finally find oneself in the ancestral land, Algeria. This film speaks of the modern human who loses herself/himself and then finds herself/himself in a new economically and culturally globalized world. 


(Shown at the festival du film amazigh in Algeria, Coup de Soleil Salon du livre maghrebin in Paris, Etna experimental film lab, Bulgarian film festival, Femme Film de Creteil festival in Paris.)

16mm 'Film Syracusian Highway'

"Put on Your Dress and Dance" 

A 16 mm film framing the african voice on american land.  Poetic imagery of an african american girl giving me a kabyle dress to put on and dance with her. 

8mm experimental film and sound

8mm Cadavre Exquis  

Vocals and Effects  inspired by colors and shapes of 8mm film

I made the sound track in Audacity software with sounds of my voice and water remixed, and slowed down, cut up, reverse effects. After editing the film in Final Cut pro software, I created the sound while watching it.
8 mm Film footage shot and developed manualy in Paris with Mauricio Hernandez at l'Etna film group

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Documentary: Lettre Intime à Haïti

"Lettre Intime à Haïti with Love Paris"art documentary 50 minutes

« Lettres à Haïti with Love Paris » 50 minutes. Portraits of 9 Haïtians living in Paris and how they find solutions to reconstruct Haïti from far away in 2011. Prince Luc,

Haïtian painter sees his history through the paintings of the Louvre. Rosemary dreams of discovering her native country which she has never seen. Maître Hyppolite finds a social formula for good governement. Sophie Picavet creates an association to help Haïtian artists. The soul of Haïti dances through the film waking itself up, half dead, half alive, to a new dream with JYB’s poems and the dreams of Killy the artist.

Art Documentary: Code secret des femmes Berberes

exerps of film

"MOTIF BERBER; CODE SECRET DES FEMMES" 45 minutes documentary

"SECRET MOTIFS; THE CODED LANGUAGE OF BERBER WOMEN"

Art documentary made between Ath Yenni, and Ouacif in the Djurdjura mountains of Kabylie where the women continue to use coded motifs in their weavings, and painted motifs on their walls and potteries.

Stop motion Sand animation created on glass with light while listening to Nasa planet frequencies, and Shaman music from Lapland and experimental music from Istanbul created by Nilufer Ormanli and Tuna Pase.

This is the story of nature and humanity and pollution of plastic, projected to support the French ecological campaign of  Eva Jolie at Montreuil, France.

Suprematist animation of a winter night in upstate New York where all the objects decompose into a series of abstracted compositions and the ice sheets move around and the tree trunks become chopsticks. I watched the animation to create the chant to go with it. To my surprise, it had a very ethnic Berber sound to it. I found that very personal chants vibrate with the cells inside our bodies which are full of our ancestral dna heritage. This dna probably has a sonic memory and might release old sounds and chants from our subconscious and transmit it to our breath which carries it to the voice.

Archetype Memory

Open GL with C programing and composition with supremastist thought, The motion of the long rectangles represent vicking ship rowing gestures, and the crosses simulated fish, souls, and celtic crosses. Advised by Ed Zajec, computer graphic pioneer.
Sound created with my voice and combination of metallic objects and electronic music accompanying
this abstract animation. 

Singing to Personal Sound Mandalas

   Sound Mandala: Creating a visual Mandala and singing to it. 

Sand Mandala made on the boarder of Djanet and Libya. I initiated a workshop with children and young adults to make their own sound mandalas and  add objects which create a visual spacial composition which will inspire them to find sounds with their voices and objects to make rhythms.  This was supported by the association 'league des jeunes de Djanet' with the director Mohammed Ghilali.

Experimenting with Objects and Paintings: Intuitive Music Scores

                       
Natural Water Composition 1 -
I found this song while filming the thermal water of the Canions near  Permet, Albania 2012

                       
Hudson River Composition 1 -
I found a song while looking at this hudson valley painting in the Albany museum of
New York State 2003.

                       
Painting of Sculpture atelier Composition 2 -
I found this chant as I observed and listened to what the painting was describing in the Albany
museum of New York State 2003.

                     
Iroquois Painting of the Turtle world Composition 3 -
I deciphered the painting's shapes and found sounds to accompany them.

                    

Stool, arm Chair and Trumpet : Object Composition 1-
I found sounds by immersing my body with these 3 objects.

       Reading Paintings and Objects as Intuitive Music Scores:

                                    Translating their form into sound.

 Singing to paintings is a type of navigation from one area of the image to the other.  Drawing, painting or sculpting a feeling becomes a new language. I find myself looking at these visual compositions and spacial manifestations as new musical scores, which can help me find songs, and abstracted sounds, and creates a new energy. 

I realized this performance at the Albany museum of fine arts in Albany, New York. A suspended field of memory lurked around
the Hudson river valley paintings and Irokois silk screens by Tom Two Arrows, I wanted to bring
them into my present space by making soundscapes with my voice, my body and my breath.

I have also performed time travel songs in front of the Hittite and Hatian statue collection of the Ankara Museum of Ancient Anatolian civilization in Ankara, Turkey. 

My Chants

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Chant que jai "trouvé" en filmant l'eau sulfurique des canions proche de Permet,Albanie. Chant trouvé avec mes amis de Timimoun à coté d'une source du Sahara.

Ancient Berber Chant of Exile performed at Cabaret Sauvage, Villette, Paris
for the remembrance of the great algerian journaliste Tahar Djaout who died for his beliefs
of saying the truth and was killed at the age of 35 years during the Printemps noir of 1993.



"Rusted Moon", written about the broken dreams of algerian people during the
printemps noir after Tahar Djaout was killed for his beliefs :
"If you say it you will die, If you keep quiet you will die, so Say it and die"
Tahar Djaout

"A Said Lamara", a traditional kabyle song which I interpreted and added my own
touch to...it is about a young woman in the forest who imagines her lover being transformed
as a little twig floating on the river...and she takes this twig with her back to her home so that
when the nite comes, the twig becomes her lover...
She fantasizes this and sings it to the river, as she knows that the villagers would never
accept nor allow her to bring her lover home.

"You can change Baby" - A song I wrote and sang for Ecological awareness. With Emmanuel Cornil
on tabla percussions.


My Modern vocal and piano interpretation of Semman chant which is an ancient kabyle chant.



"La danceuse Inconnue" , ancient Kabyle chant I have adapted with Emmanuel Cornil on perscussions.

improvised chant in Djanet, Sahara with Ahmed Shakali playing oud and vocal, and Levy Shikova
playing the Ney.

illustrations of the "Last song of the Sea" with vocal performance

Story telling and chanting to illustrations of the pollution in the sea of Istanbul for children.
3 examples of 30 illustrations of the story "Last song of the mediteranean sea".
(Performed at Dulcinea art space in Istanbul and at the library of Toucy, France)

Video Poem- 'La Comédie des Beurs'

La Comédie des beurs is a video poem which describes the feeling a child of immigrants

might feel between two countries. The displacement becomes a poetic ground for exploring the

inbetween space of neither here nor there.
(Shown in New York, Boston, Ankara, Istanbul, Paris.)

Teaching Film Workshops in Kabylie, Algeria

'ENTRE L'AMOUR ET LE KIF'

38 minutes film written, produced, filmed and
edited in Algeria, Ath Lahcen within my film workshops "Ateliers Djurdjura cinéma"-

A fiction story about a young man who escapes boredom, depression and non employment in the soft illusionnary arms of drugs called 'Kif' in Kabylie. But this sweet illusion has a price to pay, and the young man must find the money by stealing and selling his mother's belongings. Our anti hero has made a bad reputation for himself in the village, and soon enough, his girlfriend finds out. She asks him to choose between life with her or life with drugs. Made with Final cut pro and Audacity.
(This film was selected for the Amazighen film festival in Tizi Ouzou and Berber television in Paris.)

Teaching Film Workshop in Tinjdad, Morocco

                    

                         
                    

"Hafida, the girl who dreamed of flying away" 12 minutes student

film written and directed by Hafida Youssif in my video art workshops 

in Tinjdad, Errachidia Morocco.

Video production workshop where technical storyboarding, lighting, filming, editing and sound editing 

were taught. Using Photoshop, Adobe Premiere and Pro tools. 12 youths made 5 films in one summer. Here is the exemple of one student's work; Hafida!

Second Life Workshops between Tunisia/Algeria/USA

"Droit D'Asile"- Dolphin manifesto for the dying dolphins of the Mediterranean Sea

I initiated and taught a video art project in Algiers on 'second life', an internet platform for avatars, with  the students of l'Ecole des beaux Arts of Algiers in collaboration with Wafa Bourkhis who worked with us from Tunisia, and we invited the usa second life artists troupe called "second front" to dance inside of our  'underwater' artscape.

Teaching Film Workshops in the Sahara

"POUR MON AMOUR" 22 minute digital film made by my students

Under my supervision during the 2012 Winter film workshops I gave at Djanet. I taught with Malik Hammani the filmmaking techniques of lighting, filmmaking, editing, story boarding, sound recording and visual composition with personal video equipement. We were invited and lodged by Mohammed Ghilali representing the association "League de la jeunesse de Djanet".