Salih Albarrak is a designer based in Riyadh, he has a profound interest in the overlap between storytelling, alchemy, and design. This journey has allowed him to construct a fabric of works and techniques, effectively capturing the essence of speculative social and political structures that reside on the fringes of reality.
Salih Albarrak is an architect/artist based in Riyadh, he has a profound interest in the overlap between storytelling, alchemy, and design. This journey has allowed him to construct a fabric of works and techniques, effectively capturing the essence of speculative social and political structures that reside on the fringes of reality. A Distinct Sense of Absence (2023)
an audio visual video game controlled by a modular synthesizer
︎︎Here comes my frightening dream… The tender sun smiles upon the earth, and the foul sounds of my mind subside. A fear awakens and slips into the cracks of my vision, inflicting a powerful punch: inescapable and destructive, a camouflaged attack that ripples far and wide in my spirit, whispering, 'I am here.' That is weirdness; that is what danger in its infancy feels like. Its genesis reveals a subtle misbehavior of my spirit—a departure from the familiar—a disfigured after-image of the ordinary.
It erupted as a failed emulsion of my vision and restraint when I decided to feed an insatiable curiosity: a violent urge to explore what lies beneath the immediate beauty, to peek into the inverted image. It is a desire which outweighs all my morals and fears, a rebellious force which alters my programmed and structured views of reality. It is a spell cast by my eye, settling on creatures and scenes, leaving my mind with a distinct sense of absence and loss—an absence which I cannot verbalize. Not because my tongue has failed me, but because I have violently failed. This absence I feel has no direction or structure. It does not inevitably lead to a conclusion; it simply ushers images and events to an open-endedness, a snippet of sensory violence. In his book, Tanizaki states, "A phosphorescent jewel gives off its glow and color in the dark and loses its beauty in the light of day. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty." If my reality behaved as said phosphorescent jewel, where would its beauty lie? Is it in my darkest days or my brightest nights? When the sun shines at the break of day to illuminate my world, it doesn't do so with the intention of concealing or revealing beauty; it does it out of obligation to the cosmos. Yet, somehow, I do not know when this beauty turns sour. Is it when I get close enough to see that the goat is dead, when everyone else doesn’t see a goat at all? I am inflicted with this lingering curse, the residue of my ancestors’ tampering with the supernatural, a realm which they had left to exercise their dominion over the earth. They were summoned by the womb to suffer the consequences of Adam's gluttony by partaking in deeper shades of gluttony, answering a single question: is this doom escapable? That is what all the healers knew and asked their pagan gods: the power of turning to a different god when one doesn't answer… The power to dim the weird and illuminate the beauty... The power in occupying the frightening stasis of permanence.︎︎
