on the tenth day, he finds himself in a museum full of strange objects, musical instruments from impenetrable cultures. A worn sound has brought him there, it comes from a cylinder of a waxy material spinning in front of him in a strange machine, with each turn of the needle it releases sand. It covers his feet, it covers the entire floor of the museum. The sand shifts with each cycle of the cylinder, like a mechanical tide inexorably rising. Now he has more control over the technique of the experiment; he can move about the building and its rooms under the light that falls through a large, collapsed skylight

sitting in a chair is an old woman, her name is Thérèse Rivière, where are we? she asks. In a mental hospital, she answers. She accepts without concern the behavior of this traveler who comes and goes, exists, speaks, smiles at her, is silent, listens to her and disappears the sand on the floor changes and throbs as if the museum were the archive of her memory, the memories of a French ethnologist. We are in the Aurés, an extension of the Atlas Mountains in a colonial state called Algeria, the place where historically the Berbers resisted against the Romans, Vandals, Byzantines and Arabs. There are photos in the museum of unveiled Berber women, taken by a French army officer of his prisoners in 1960, one looks like Thérèse. As she looks up at the skylight, a Maqam Sigah (from Persian se-gāh سه + گاه = سهگاه "third place") widely used by Middle Eastern Jews for their cantilenas (Hebrew: טעמים) plays. Thérèse looks down, looks at the visitor, and says, "Let the waters be gathered into one place" (Book of Genesis 1:9)._

_Over the Maqam, a chant is superimposed. A sharp rhythm that pulls it upward like a human castle, a secularized religious tower along the peninsular Levant. Beyond the dome of the museum he sees the mosque of Jezzar Pasha (Arabic: جامع جزار باشا) erected by Ahmad Pasha el-Jazzar, famed for defeating Napoleon, and made of stones from other cities. He begins to hum a song in a language unknown to him. His feet rise on waves of sand, he remembers, his name is Abdellatif, and the language is Tarifit, that of his mother, Amazigh (in Berber language ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ)) from the Riff Mountains. Under the roof of the museum feels like far away, in Jerusalem in 1967, Sebag Yehuda, recorded by a Bengali man, plays the lute and sings in memory of Andalusia

through the skylight he goes out into the desert, leaving the museum under the dune. Already up, he observes how objects and instruments of all kinds are scattered on the dune, an accident of memories. With a sharp drop in bass frequencies he feels his hands begin to grind on the Mehbash, the coffee mortar of the Bedouins of Syria. A continuous, accelerated pulse entangles with new bass frequencies of the Sintir of the sub-Saharan slaves, mutually applauding each other and adding to the vibrations of the wax cylinder in the subsoil of the dune. Soil liquefaction begins to occur. The desert begins to take on the consistency of a heavy liquid. To the rhythm of the Mehbash, the desert engulfs and welcomes, with the irreversible hospitality of time, everything that previously floated on the sand. The museum scrambles to disappear along with hundreds of folded pipes of the organ of the cathedral of Seville with a jumble of frequencies and tones. As he whirls with the sand like a whirling dervish, he distinguishes among the distant polyphonies a few words: "I am not Christian, nor Jew, nor magician, nor Muslim. I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea." _

the desert engulfs him and he returns to the subsoil of the present._ continue reading...

Here you can see in detail the collage and the songs used in the piece with their albums/files of provenance: