الحال و المحال - ثلاثية - Al-Hal wa L’Mouhal - A trilogy (The codition and the impossible)
17 min - 14 min - 19 min, Brussels, Belgium, 2025Chapter 1 - Excerpt - 2min
Chapter 2 - Excerpt - 4min
Chapter 3 - Excerpt - 3min
Featuring Danila Gambettola
Music Nicolas Jaar
Al-Hal wa L’Mouhal - A trilogy is a 50-minute video installation structured in three chapters,unfolding through the symbolic resonance of seven colors. Interweaving found footage of Moroccan mystical brotherhoods like the Gnawa and Issawa with Danila Gambettola’s performance //EUSAPIA!$&PLZ COME BACK TO ME, FAC!&K!£$LOMBROSO2*, the work examines liberation as a practice through myth, ritual, and the body.
It navigates the tension between possession and agency, tracing the spiritual economies in which jnun—spirits referred to as mluk or "owners"—occupy and claim dominion over bodies, demanding submission through trance, music, and sacrifice.
Gambettola’s invocation of Eusapia Palladino—a historical medium whose powers unsettled scientific rationality—anchors the work in a broader critique of authority, exclusion, and spectral resistance. Her body, moving between the visible and invisible realms, destabilizes established power structures, reframing healing and spiritual agency outside hereditary privilege. Spirit praise-poetry and the myth of Lalla Aicha further invert gendered hierarchies, offering an alternative ontology where access to the baraka—the divine blessing—is no longer dictated by l ineage but by embodied transgression.
Through its fusion of archival material, performative embodiment, and speculative mythmaking, the installation crafts a new political ontology rooted in the irrational and the spectral. It proposes a radical reconfiguration of normativity, where possession, devotion, and resistance converge as strategies of survival. The final act of ritual hospitality—an animal sacrifice offered to Gambettola’s spirit—signals a reversal of hostility, affirming the margin as a space where power is continuously renegotiated, reimagined, and reclaimed.
©2025 Nabil Aniss