Whenever a Star Loses Its Orbit
Kinetic Installation —
Matel
135 × 600 × 450 cm
2025
This work is inspired by a verse from the poem “Al-Bedouin” by Sudanese poet Mohammed Abdulbari: “Whenever a star strays from its orbit, it comes seeking their footsteps to guide it.” Here, the traditional relationship between human and sky is reversed; instead of the Bedouin navigating by the stars, the stars themselves search for human traces.
This inversion reveals a loss of inherited knowledge and suggests a shared disorientation that binds human beings and nature in a fragile moment of memory and identity.
This concept materializes through mechanical pulleys rotating within ascaffolding structure, forming a visual simulation of celestial orbits and wandering paths. Each circular form is composed of words from the poetic verse in transparent material, allowing language itself to become light, trajectory, and knowledge. The scaffolding represents a contemporary industrial framework that contains and redefines this search.
Between poetry and engineering, between disorientation and order, the work evokes the historic relationship between the Bedouin and the sky, while posing a contemporary question about humanity’s place in the universe—at the intersection of memory, motion, and the enduring search for guidance.
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