Sound installation showing and performative action by Sara Rodowicz-Ślusarczyk
Cafe Tissardamine, Tissardmine, Morocco, December 6, 2023

Sara Rodowicz-Ślusarczyk’s sound installation ‘Rain Applause’ is the stage for a certain performance. Its scenario has been written for two protagonists; one being the rain and the other a person encountering its imagery. On December 6, 2023, the work was premiered in the Tissardmine oasis in the Moroccan Sahara.

‘Rain Applause’ takes on the form of a pillar modelled from a theatre curtain. From within it comes the sound of applause, as if a crowd behind the curtain was rewarding someone (or something) with an ovation. Once inside, however, the viewer is alone with themselves – and with the sound of falling rain.

The installation plays on a dialectical transgression of the distinction between the internal and the external, the public and the intimate, juxtaposing imagination and experience, art and nature, and actors of the cultural performance with human as well as the non-human subjects of the drama of its reality.

Is the applause coming from the installation intended for the person deciding to step inside the art piece? Or does it praise the rain heard upon entering behind the curtain? Does rain deserve an ovation? Or does it rather wash away the pathos of the applause? During the premiere show of the work, these questions were posed against the backdrop of the desert landscape. It is an ecosystem where water is at its lowest ebb and precipitation a rare event. In the cultural tradition, the desert is a place of seclusion and meditation, a space to confront oneself, in which one receives a lesson in humility from nature. From the perspective of the ecological condition of the modern world, it is an environment whose extreme character sharpens universal problems such as global warming and the scarcity of freshwater. Thus it magnifies matters of survival strategies and models of coexistence between man and nature.

The idea contained in Sara Rodowicz-Ślusarczyk’s action of listening to the sound of rain falling in the Sahara is an intention that is as utopian as it is poetic. This gesture has been addressed to a small community of the inhabitants of the Tissardmine oasis. It was an invitation to live an intimate yet collective experience, to meet, to talk and to practice together the awareness that the division between culture and nature is an illusory curtain behind which stretches a reality which functions rather as an interconnected vessel.

The project has been realised with the support of the
ADAM MICKIEWICZ INSTITUTE

The project is co-organised by the artistic residency centre Cafe Tissardmine