Created in 2023, in the first moments after the Hamas attacks and the beginning of the Israeli bombardments in Gaza, The Snake Charmer is a shroud. It consists of a fabric structure suspended by metal cables and bathed by projected light that visitors can enter and be enveloped by.

The footage comes from Jama Masjid in Leh, Ladakh, in the high Himalayas. Ladakh is contested territory: it remains disputed between India, Pakistan, and China, and its history is marked by the tensions between Buddhist and Muslim communities who have lived there side by side for centuries. The mosque itself was built in 1667, not as an act of devotion but as a demand: the price extracted by the Mughal Empire for defending the Ladakhi king against Tibetan invasion. A sacred space born from the calculus of war.

Inside the installation, algorithms endlessly recombine the captured videos: architecture, light, the call to prayer. A generative soundscape layers field recordings, drone and fragments of voice creates an evolving sound environment. The visitor is held within a space that is simultaneously sanctuary and evidence, mourning and witness.

The title borrows from Jean-Léon Gérôme's Orientalist painting of 1870, an image that reduced the East to exotic scenery for Western consumption. Here, the visitor is surrounded by evidence of Muslim sacred life, not as a spectacle but as someone’s lived reality.

The poem that accompanies the work is Not Just Passing by Heba Abu Nada, a Palestinian writer killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on October 20th, 2023. She was 32 years old.

Yesterday, a star said
to the little light in my heart,
We are not just transients
passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow
some wanderers go on
walking.

You were first created out of love,
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.

One day, all gardens sprouted
from our names, from what remained
of hearts yearning.

And since it came of age, this ancient language
has taught us how to heal others
with our longing,

how to be a heavenly scent
to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,
a gasp of oxygen.

Softly, we pass over wounds,
like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,
an aspirin.

O little light in me, don’t die,
even if all the galaxies of the world
close in.

O little light in me, say:
Enter my heart in peace.
All of you, come in!

- Heba Abu Nada (1991-2023), Not Just Passing, 2023

The Snake Charmer, 2023
generative multimedia installation, HD video, 5.1 sound
300 x 400 x 250 cm