Rakkaza is a public interactive installation that invokes a direct confrontation between the current sky in the planet’s current location and the sky when the planet was on the opposite side of the sun. The name derives from an Arabic riddle that hints towards the Sun as a mirrored disk anchored in the sea and calibrated within its reflection axis.

Referencing a Recipe for Making A Human by 8th Century Muslim Polymath Jabir Ibn Hayyan, the artists Asma Belhamar & Mays Albaik explore the connection between creation and place via studying and recording the planetary relationship to the sun and the repetition of the rotation around it. The rotation displayed and the new realm created become one of the most vital parts of creation from the ingredients studied in the recipe. The piece departs from exploring the details of the recipe, creating a parallel realm and a reinterpretation of its elements. It examines the spectrum of human-made vs nature-made and questions the physicality of time and the existence beyond the body’s physical experience.

From a planetary scale to a personal scale, the artists reflect on the idea of place being a significant marker to personhood in a time when physical mobility is being confronted with digital mobility, and its current presence as a second-nature. The space created, introduces a new realm where time and place are examined beyond the physicality of their presence, non-bound by a definition and non-calibrated by a single cycle.