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هوية راعي الأشجار، 2021/عمل تحت التنفيذ
فاطمة هيبة
فيديو أدائي نصي مصحوب بشريط صوتي مع تفريغ نصّي بديل

تعكس أعمال مثل التنظيف والتطعيم والتسميد في العناية بالنباتات المنزلية كيفية عمل التضامن النسوي بين النساء المصابات بمرض نفسي أو مرض مزمن أو إعاقة. تتناقض إيماءات الرعاية هذه مع الوظيفة التي يهيمن عليها الذكور لجراحي وأخصائيي الأشجار الذين يقلمون الشجر في شوارع القاهرة. يجسد هذا المشروع التضامن النسوي من خلال الكلام المجازي للعناية بالنباتات، ويتناول قضايا التنوع والاكتفاء الذاتي والاعتماد المتبادل والاستقلالية.

يتناول الفيديو الأدائي، المصور في منزل مصري، ديناميكيات الطاقة داخل المنازل والموافقة والبحث عن الاهتمام. يقوم الشريط الصوتي بتجميع كلمات من نصوص « هوية راعي الأشجار» التي تم العمل عليها خلال ورشة عمل معمل التأثير الإبداعي بالقاهرة مع كتابات فاطمة هيبة الواقعية السحرية حول النباتات لتمثيل الحوار الداخلي للنبات، والتي تعرف نفسها على أنها امرأة ومحبة وأم وزهرة. الوصف الصوتي والنص المصحوبان يجعلان السرد ممكن فهمه.

يرتبط « هوية راعي الأشجار» بالتجربة الشخصية للعيش لمدة ثماني سنوات مع الأدوية والتدخلات الإكلينيكية والعلاج والشفاء. يتحدث الفيديو الأدائي مباشرة إلى النساء ذوات الإعاقة أو المصابات بأمراض مزمنة أو تم تشخيصهن بأمراض نفسية أثناء أداء دور قوي في منازلهم. تتعلق استعارة النبات بالترابط بين الكائنات الحية الداخلية والبيئة الخارجية: ضوء الشمس والهواء والتربة وجرّاح الأشجار.

سيتم تطوير هذا المشروع بشكل أكبر في المستقبل من خلال التصوير المُدمج والرسوم المتحركة إطارًا تلو الآخر لتقديمه كعرض أدائي لمسابقة روزنامة في مدرار.

The Gender of the Tree Surgeon, 2021/work-in-progress
Fatma Heiba
Video performance with transcript accompanied by audio with alt text transcription

In taking care of an interdependent house plant, actions like cleaning, repotting, and fertilizing mirror how female solidarity works among women with a mental health diagnosis, chronic illness, or disability. These gestures of care contrast with the the male-dominated job of tree surgeons and arborists who cut down trees in the streets of Cairo. Through the metaphor of caring for a plant, this project embodies female solidarity and tackles issues of diversity, self-sufficiency, interdependence, and independence.

Set in an Egyptian home, the video performance addresses power dynamics within households, approval, and attention-seeking. The audio collages words from “time capsule” texts created in the CIL Cairo workshop with Heiba’s magical-realist writings about plants to represent the inner dialogue of the plant, who identifies herself as a woman, a lover, a mother, and a flower. An accompanying audio description and transcription make this narrative accessible.

The Gender of the Tree Surgeon relates to the personal experience of living for eight years with medications, clinical interventions, therapy, and healing. The video performance speaks directly to women who have a disability, are chronically ill, or have a mental health diagnosis while performing a powerful role in their households. The metaphor of the plant relates to the interdependency between interior organisms and the external environment: sunlight, air, soil, and the tree surgeon.

In the future, this project will be further developed with integrated filming and frame-by-frame animation, for a performance to be submitted for Medrar’s Roznama.

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Transcript of the left channel

[leaf sweeping in loops]



I want time
to be remembered
to stay
I want control
support
I want unconditional love
I want power
I want energy
antidepressants
I want backups
I want loyalty
peace
I want focus
some room
I want emotions
I want a process
compassion
I want you to listen
I want time




[End Leaf sweeping in loops]
[overlapping leaf sweeping and harsh wind]
[harsh wind in loops]


I need a field
space
to grow
trust
I need presence
awareness
loudness
I need wonder
connectedness
value
respect
Spirit
I need boldness
sympathy
empathy
roundness
I need to be vocal
to communicate
certainty
to absorb
focus
to connect
peace
I need a mind
a heart
a gut
roots
I need a field



[End harsh wind in loops]
[overlapping harsh wind and processed wind]
[processed wind in loops]



I remember details of intimacy. I do not necessarily love all the associations regarding these details. I remember that you forget everything, that you do not know how to discuss. So, you have to write and gather your thoughts then tell them to me. I also know that you have hidden all the words a writer could use. You decided to prepare for me a little treasure hunt. I thought I would love you more and think only of you. But my soul is all about accidentally stumbling into the air breeze.


I used to go around with a small notebook after you writing your little confessions of preferences. Now I hardly write what you ask me to bring when I get back home.

I know you are real. You are the reality in my fictional world. That’s always the case love. I always am ready to start a new path, a different way of walking. Tiptoe. Heel to toe. Toe to toe. Root to root, root to stem, stem to leaf.

But I just find the old mindsets surround me just as they decide to live a different life. So now you want me to understand your metaphors but you never knew that I lived among them for years. I would honestly say that when I met you, I decided to forget how they worked. and then you told me you are the one who would tell me who I am.
it’s strange how the laws of nature work. They get attracted to the path I have been in. it’s never too late for them to get that. I am no longer about metaphors. The usual case is that you find your attraction and it changes but the thing is that I was your attraction but you found my change. You missed it, you came one second late. You never saw your attraction in me in action except as a shadow. Now I am my new decisions, my new way to live and think. You loved the traces you saw, the shadow of the attraction I used to be.

I see that in an ice-cream-shaped cone.


Oh, I love her roman feet. I love the magic more than the magician. She is known by her deeds, what is a woman but deeds? Character alone is good for nothing but to be in a frame hanging on the wall. But her created auras around moments proves me wrong always, and I love it.

Be poetic. Purple and green. Have Always been fascinated by these two colors. identity crisis. My palette has a no-mix strategy. I just dip the brush into one color then the next then VOILA it dances a bit on the canvas then it kicks the canvas trying to blend.

Imagine the purple iris and the greenery around it. Am I a wildflower I need to exist in a field, not a vase, not in a flower shop not even in a pot. I appreciate individuality but I prefer empathy. I want bees to take my nectar. I want to be around other flowers. I want to be roommates with weed and eat nutrients medium-rare. I want to be rooted in vast soil, earth. As an Iris, a purple one.

Homo sapiens seem to forget that greenery lived way before them and will continue to live way after them anyway. They claim that plants do not survive. They die fast and whither. No sir. Life does not end. Life does not begin. It’s a cycle and mine is quick.

As a houseplant fantasizing to be an Iris. Or as an iris thinking, she is a houseplant. The symbol of the female womb in my own dictionary. Iris. I gave birth to Sloppy plant even when biology was astonished, sloppy plant existed, in my country compound names are banned, a bit dystopian, I know. But anyways your lover made it possible. Magic monsieur. As a human I live in multiple forms I am the oxygen I breathe the carbon dioxide I exhale, and then again the oxygen I generate. I live in them and they live in me.

I am the creatures that leave the surface of my skin when I touch your lover with the tip of my fingers. I soak the cotton pad with milk water and carefully pat the leaf. I travel through the milk, the water, the cotton into the leaf in the soil into infinite cycles.

I love your lover till the end, till the non-existing end, I live and I love. I used to think that other auras took from me and leave me unattended. But now I know that this is not true. There is no trace of your aura in your lover, the parent of my second child.

I did not imagine that I could be unloved but now realized that I just as pooh I am loved by empty honey jars. Always found one in every corner. Do not think of yourself as once unloved by her. Her empty jar made you ready for the coming. I send you love. Your lover too, we often talk about you. sHe will always remember you. I find the things that I am okay with are really strange. I am okay with her saying your name and recalling your memories together. My past delusions say a lot about me. An Immense feeling of struggle along with a troubled body image, whenever I weighed above 60 kilograms. A sense of being in a show. A sense that I got mixed identities, my mom must be my brother in disguise if he exists in the first place, so I see made-up characters disguised as other made-up characters. In the struggle to be what I believe in. That is my curse. I live

I am far behind in my prayers. So, I just skip them. I always think about them. I guess this counts for something. A catalyst for a change indeed they are. Prayers are like confrontations I am okay about them but when you do not act upon them, they seem hypocritical. I am frightened a lot. Frightened of my secrets but I keep them in grey areas.

I think I am way past the existential crisis I am in the I know I do not work do not labor and I am not active. But I do not care.

I wish I was altruistic. I want to save my sloppy plant. You know I tied my tubes in the first place because I was believing in an altruistic cause I wanted to save other possible children from being born. I wanted to be more, more of everything. And less of you. She is your lover. You do not sense her but you love her anyway it’s weird. You imagine that you could once lose control of all of your senses and you will go around doing harm knowing it but with no will. In school, you heard a younger girl say that there is a rare condition where one has no control over herself, she could utter words unwillingly. Try not to be original. Put some effort into it. I tell myself each night before sleep. Sloppy plant the perfect child as perfect as uncared could be. It’s normal to have an unbalanced diet, shifty weight, and identity crisis. You hate the idea of killing animals, you hate burgers but the sight of natural leather bags makes you dripple. You know the fact that you never drank real coffee, by real I mean anything but 3in1. You are missing a lot just because you need to create some path. An imaginary path.
The parent of sloppy plant, your lover is thought to be normal, plain, average-minded, a bore, such a realist, far from imaginative.
I keep on just living. But actually, she is your imagination field. Your lover is the parent of my daughter. Sloppy plant was born miraculously. I underwent tubal ligation you know. But your donor’s sperms and my eggs desperately wanted to meet so they did.

[End processed wind in loops]
[overlapping processed wind and leaf sweeping]
[leaf sweeping in loops]

I am a statement
I am a reflection
I am a community

[leaf sweeping in loops]

I am a statement
I am a reflection
I am a community



[End leaf sweeping in loops]