#10: The poem

So when I was working on "Umbra", I asked my friends, Dutch writer, Maria Barnas to write a few poems based on the idea of the shadow, at the time she was living in Berlin. And we communicated over emails. I was writing her about all my ideas and thoughts and dreams, et cetera, all based on the shadow. Somehow, she connected those with her own idea or her own personal shadows. She wrote several poems.

I often work with writers because I often lack the words myself. So I feel it really adds a different layer. Even for my very first book, “Flamboyant”, I asked a writer, an African writer, Moses Isegawa. I asked him to write a short story inspired by my work. For me, it was very important to have it not as a critical text, but as a work of art in itself, or as fiction.

So coming back to Maria Barnas and her poems for "Umbra", one of the poems that she wrote is “Hurtling”, it's one of my favorite poems. At some point, I was traveling in South Africa, and I met this young guy who was born deaf. And I asked him to translate the poem into sign language. Now I'm giving it away the trick, I filmed his arms , and you see his arms and the shadow of his arms, and I reversed it. That's basically what you see.