University of the Underground

Laila Saber Rodriguez is an Egyptian and Mexican artist who uses experimental video and film in the form of installation. In her film installations, she creates fictive worlds blended with real events to dissolve the legitimacy of linear time and truth, offering alternative visions of reality. Laila investigates themes related to genesis, mythology, and historical storytelling. Historical storytelling, for her, means how we relate to history as a space and time in the past, and come to share stories about our experience of it in the present to construct an image of the future. This can be through memory, dreams, drawings or oracles. Likewise, at the heart of her work is a movement-based storytelling. Guided by a nomadic approach to making and engaging with material, she is interested in how movement or motion is not only being a physical action or change, but can be an ontology, or a framework. The installations take the viewer through a journey, where you are traversing between relatable and real to mythological and fictive landscapes; inviting you to go on a personal endeavour of self-decentralisation; exiting Laila’s work as a hybrid being.