From one world to another, art transforms itself, changes, shifts, to the point where it sometimes becomes radically heterogeneous to its laws and rules. To the point where it bears no resemblance to its original character. But art also alters and transforms the world through its play of light and shadow. By constantly rearranging them. By depriving them of any harmony and any relationship of identification.

This constitutive plasticity of art is where Siwa situates itself. A place where nothing is located definitively. A place of translations and transformations. Siwa operates on the edges of the world, moves around its edges, and questions their forms (because edges deform, reform, and are transformed). Siwa rejects any pre-constituted and closed interior in what is referred to as the "Arab world" or "Arab art" and what is called "the West" or "Western art". Similarly, it refuses any localised and recognised exterior.

This place of translation is the place of the thinking that Siwa is trying to develop on the questions it began to raise from its first edition. Questions regarding representation in Arabic, Arab artistic creation, the passage from a Western art (theatre, for example) to another culture or another language, the transformations of the symbolic in artistic performance, and so on. To do this, Siwa chose to structure this experiment in thinking, to incorporate initiatives of artistic creation and to support performances in their research that sometimes proves impossible.

Plasticity is what gives form and what receives it too. Plasticity is also what explodes and destroys all form (1). These ideas are implied in the Siwa experience: the radical approach required to develop this thinking on Arab art comes from a necessity for the future. A necessity for language to temporalise and prepare to welcome the event and its new modes of presence. But the language that makes this demand becomes uninhabitable in the usual sense that one can simply inhabit a language and be situated in it. It is a language that is crossed through only, and in which there are only temporary and precarious sites, like the oasis in the desert. One can therefore appreciate the essential position of the question of translation and passage in this experience.

The ongoing project between the two directors Haytham Abderrazak (Iraq) and Michael Cerda (France) illustrates the challenge taken on by Siwa. It is an artistic project where two heterogeneous languages seek to enter into an impossible dialogue. In the first edition, a text (2) by the Iraqi author Almadjidi Khazaal, who attempted a poetic translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, was the basis for this dialogue. Throughout the entire period the two directors were working together, each spent his time destroying preconceived ideas of the other, and as a result watching his own identity falter.

Similarly, the echo of Najib Cherradi’s voice resonating in the electro-acoustic device stirs up a volcanic magma from the bottomless depths of language. The letter is an edge over an abyss that is constantly shifting (3). An abyss from which nouns spring like a salvation and a danger at the same time. An abyss that slips its call behind every call and invocation and makes their situations impossible. An abyss that also refuses the present and holds itself back, thus becoming almost quasi-transcendental, or a condition of possibility that is never removed from these edges that are letters.

The incomplete nature of artistic experiences highlighted by Siwa is part of the greater issue of temporality and thinking developed by the event. It brings us back to the abyss of language holding back, and allows for the improbable to happen. To a certain extent, the incomplete nature of the work of art is what enables it to open up a world where the other can enter. The effort of reflecting on Arab art begins by welcoming its future. And by working on the Arabic language’s access to its temporality, that is to say to its future beyond any calculation based on a past present or an ultimate destiny.
The act of welcoming: a hospitality that must constantly be thought and re-thought to the limits of languages and the arts. A hospitality that is thought through, performed in the tension between hosts. Their generosity and hostility are put to the test of art’s questioning. Siwa opens a space and time where this may happen. Or not. But the main thing is to prepare for its coming.

1. The concept of plasticity that appears in Hegel is developed in the philosophical sense by Catherine Malabou.

2. K. Almadjidi, Hamlet without Hamlet, Tr. A. Sadallah, translation not yet published, adapted for A.S. Nogaret’s project.

3. "Al Harf", letter in Arabic, also means edge and inflection.