Opening exhibition Spiritual Disobedience #1

Al Falak Al Majdoub: On wandering machines and song-maps of (no)return [الفلك المجذوب: رسائل في المَكِينَات الهائِمة وخرائط الـاـعودة الناغِمة] by AZ OOR.

Defying time and space to allow pre-colonial Maghreb to visit us through a fragmentary catalogue of prayers, noises, characters and stories, Gemaal op Zuid proudly presents Al Falak Al Majdoub [The Entranced Orbit] as the first chapter of the exhibition series Spiritual Disobedience. Rooted in Amazigh geography and the Maghreb as a site of participation in the World, and guided by the words and absence of 16th-century Sufi and social reformist Sidi Abderhman El Majdoub, we begin our journey.

The work unfolds as a tripartite gesture: a visual production (Wall Painting), a sound installation (Electrical Wanderers), and a theory-fiction (Tales of the Electromancer). The constellation is a proto-Sufipunk tale, envisioning a time and space where technology and worldbuilding emerge from Quranic theurgy, Sufi-plural-cosmologies, and practices of reparation [Islah], reenchantment [Tazkiyah], and everyday blessing [Baraka]. 

At its core, Al Falak Al Majdoub is a space-fiction exploring the theology of electricity, framing Modernity itself as a theology of electricity, where the magic realm is reified into an economic and capitalist infrastructure of power. The work travels the digital barzakh [liminal realm], where cyber-utopias and colonial infrastructures collide. Al Falak Al Majdoub carves a parallel space of survival for us to inhabit: a virtual Andalus where disenchanted worlds are reenchanted. It asks: how to occupy digital realms without fracturing the Self?