In Sange khara [Hard stone] (2025), developed for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Laila Hida offers a landscape where memory is not narrated, but circled— tentatively, tenderly, with the gravity of something sacred and half-forgotten. The project stages a kind of poetic inquiry where images seem to emerge from a re-constructed memory anchored by a 16mm film and expanded through an immersive installation. Characters cross paths, brought together through a tapestry of iconographic and cinematic references, including the young woman from Nacer Khemir’s The Wanderers of the Desert (1984) and the couple from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990). Two young men ride their bikes and strike poses on a dirt road as if freshly cast in a rap video summoning an apparition. The video unfolds as a loop of interwoven images, each slipping into the next. Its scenographic elements and layout evoke spaces of shade and desert architecture, in which every detail serves a practical function while carrying a quiet, deliberate aesthetic. Hida’s work has long explored how memory and desire survive in fragments, images, objects, and gestures that slip between fact and fiction. Here, she builds a setting where the coordinates of plot, belief, and explanation dissolve. What remains is sonic residue, atmospheric drift, handmade clues. The film gestures towards the fabrication of landscapes, trans-Saharan crossings and post-colonial imaginaries, but it does so with quiet insistence, avoiding spectacle. The installation doesn’t ask to be understood so much as inhabited. Meaning is not stated; it is stumbled into. Or perhaps, like the circles in the sand, it is something you only recognize by returning.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

Sange khara (2025), installation composed of two videos, fabric and scenographic elements, 12 , dimensions variable. Courtesy of Caravane Tighmert, Jeu de Paume and LE 18. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal, participation in São Paulo supported by Institut français within its IF-Incontournable programme, adapted for Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).