Laila Saber Rodriguez
Laila Saber Rodriguez (Cairo, Egypt & Mexico City, Mexico 1998)
Laila Saber Rodriguez is an Egyptian and Mexican interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the multifaceted magic surrounding the notion of movement. Laila questions how movement, besides being a physical action or change, can also be considered as the process of dying, living, dreaming, or recalling memories. She creates sci-fi narratives which she visually presents through film. In those sci-fi plots, she proposes alternative landscapes that question our fundamental experiences with history. According to Laila, history is not something “set in stone”, rather it is something we are constantly engaging through and becoming with. Through this, her practice opens a space for all kinds of ruptures, and synchronicities to produce regenerative stories. That’s what history is; malleable, inflatable, and tactile.
It is within precarious narratives, like memories and dreams, where Laila finds poetic gestures that re-navigate the dominant ways we relate to history and our means of recording it. For example, she often asks what would happen if we were allowed to use dreams in an official court testimony? Speculation is key to her, as it opens up such spaces in how to (un)discover ways of operating in this world and its archive.
In her recent film installation, showing the sci-fi film, Limina, Laila explores the relationship we have with the past through the process of death and rebirth in a world where there is no historical record or archive. The film references many strings from her Mexican and Egyptian ancestry creating a mosaic of realities, one that leads the viewer to question what moving with history means. The protagonist, inspired by the serpent Mesoamerican deity, Coatlicue, is escorted by her dead self, inspired by the psychopomp Raven, who teaches her how to die. In this sense, Laila means to approach knowing, recording and being as a ruptured, yet re-generative journey.
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