House of Rumor (2016)

Four channel audio-video installation, 4:3, 19 min 17 sec

The House of Rumor is one of three divine dwellings in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, alongside the House of Sleep and the House of Envy. It is the domain of Rumor, goddess of communication and distortion, where every utterance is heard, amplified, and recirculated, indifferent to truth or error. House of Rumor reimagines this space as a site of synchronized rambling: entranced bodies in motion, wandering characters, vessels for the voicing of contesting narratives. Its ambition is to distill the intensity of a particular moment in recent Egyptian history.

The years between the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the military coup of 2013 were marked by a fierce polemical storm — a deluge of speech flooding every available medium, all striving to capture the urgency of the political moment in the language of truth, freedom, and justice. New “talk shows” featured protesters, politicians, and academics in hastily staged dissections of forensic reports, court rulings, and archival fragments. It was as though the long silence of political quietude, would be countered by an unrelenting prolixity: a flooding of space by words. If tyranny depended on silence, then speech itself became a form of dissent.

House of Rumor began as an effort to think through the dissonance among dissenters, particularly around strategies of communication and the production of meaning. Nowhere was this tension more acute than in the political discourse surrounding “the martyrs”, protesters killed by police. Objects of reverence and devotion, the dead became subjects of discourse. Pursuing justice meant subsuming each individual death into a single category, a singular political form. This dilemma underwrote a series of transgressions: the unauthorized circulation of names, images, and last words in acts of commemoration, celebration, or rhetorical calls to arms. As a detached political signifier, “the martyrs” precipitated an existential crisis in meaning, a horror coded in abstraction.

Formally, House of Rumor is a four-channel synchronized audio-video installation. Through a fixed camera, repeated gestures, and visible neutrality, it reappropriates the affective atmospheres of protest as immersive non-event, questioning the limits of agency, and the cryptic power of speech to conjure guilt and fear. In the abode of rumor, voices double and redouble in a hall of echoes, hovering at the edge of intelligibility, oscillating between sonoric performance and meaningful utterance. Like revolution, it absorbs voices until they clash and collapse. Like love, it amplifies the intimate until it becomes unbearable. House of Rumor is a resonant cavity, where truth and illusion spiral, and where language is both weapon and wound.

The performers speak of love, death, revolution, and madness, sampling from a dozen sources, while moving continuously along a schema traced in white chalk on the floor. The text includes original writing by Assem Tag Eddine, Sara El Adl, and Doa Aly.

This path they trace symbolizes controlled expression: seemingly free movement unfolding within a tightly bounded trajectory. Sculpture #2: House of Rumor is inspired by Ovid’s description of the House of Rumor, with its radical openness—countless doors and apertures, its mountaintop seclusion, and the acoustic precision of its chambers.

The architecture allows sound waves to roam freely, warping as they travel through space. A remote yet central gravitational field, it absorbs, distorts, and redistributes every utterance. Sculpture #2 echoes this porous configuration: a structure that receives, contains, and reshapes resonance.