Winter 2019, AlexandriaThematic Course
Performing Fiction not enough without serendipity quest
Course details
- Cycle
- Winter 2019, Alexandria
- Taught in
- English / Arabic
Share
Discuss it with AI
- Choose your preferred AI assistant.
- A new tab will open with a prompt prepared for this page.
- Press Send to begin exploring the page through dialogue, CILAS-style.
“While watching a great dance film, I witnessed a dancer enter a painting. Taking into account that human bodies cannot do this, was that movement metaphorical or symbolic or oneiric? It was none of these. It struck me as a fact, an aesthetic fact” [Jalal Toufic, The dancer’s two bodies]
About the course
The course aims to create a space for experimentation and imagination. Standing on the hypothesis of fiction as a reality, and being skeptical towards reality as a value - If reality does exist, fiction isn’t alternative but it is the other reality - Questioning if serendipity is a spontaneous act or intentional act? - Is we call reality can be misleading? Is it possible to create other realities that are parallel to the dominant reality? Taking and treating all information equally.
In this course, we will practice the action of “Fictioning” through serendipitous methods, looking at several artistic practices, readings, poems and screenings that are related to the action of “fictioning” and the philosophy of serendipity. We will practice and examine how we can create our own fiction - fictioning ourselves to end up with the other realities.
The course is divided into three parts, starts on “serendipity and literature”, the second part on “fictioning”, and the last part “performing”: Performing can be textual either written and spoken alongside other practices related to objecthood and living as a practice.
The course involves readings by Simon O'Sullivan, Deleuze, Guattari, Jalal Toufic, Walid Raad and The encyclopedia of fictional artists.
Who teaches it
After he had written his Master’s thesis of knowledge engagement at ECAV, Switzerland 2014, Mohamed Abdelkarim turned toward producing text-based performances, and become committed to performative practices across multidisciplinary research, concerning the perception of narrating, singing, dancing, detecting and doing.
His practice engages with these actions through the focus on travel, locomotion, renegades history and picaresque literature, where a series of non-linear, serendipitous encounters with concepts, fictions, almost truth and what is known as historical facts, are gathered to form a script and an archive of events and stories. In this context, his practice aims at producing narratives and expose the way narratives are produced.
As part of his performative practices, Abdelkarim established a project "Tadbiqat" as a performative project that brings together (and synthesis across) lectures, debates, group (close) readings, critical responses, and creative quests, alongside with organizing performance nights under the title of "Live Praxes."
Get the CILAS newsletter
New courses, open calls and articles from CILAS, in your inbox.
18 October 2026
Join CILAS's Spring semester of 2026
- Spring 2026, Cairo
