HOMELAND – (Sleeping Sun)

generative visual Multi-Edition project

Video Installation, 7 minutes
Lecture Performance, 45 minutes
2025
Sameh Al Tawil & Rania Gaafar
Egypt / Germany

HOMELAND – (Sleeping Sun) is a generative visual Multi-Edition project that explores the fluidity of memory and place in the narratives of migrating art objects, exiled cultural artefacts, and their archival presence across the globe. It re-traces representations and their visual material and generates speculative forms of knowledge in / through (moving) images. Emerging from the archives of cultural memory, the material specters of Nefertiti and her fellow nomads move through contemporary digital infrastructures and visuals in acts of resurrection and care, searching for the traces of their lost lives and theor routes of forced migration to the north and elsewhere. Their statuesque imprisonment behind museum walls and glass vitrines – dispersed across the globe and confined in voyeuristic public spaces or  in the dark chambers of museums collections– makes visible the structures of the narrative in the here and now. These post-digitally awakened nomadic avatars create interferences and interventions in the grand popular narratives of icons, museum objects, artefacts  by unsettling the chronologies and signified spaces of the undead. Sleeping Sun imagines another future of media archaeology by acknowledging and critically visualizing speaking objects and their affectively signified living ecological habitat. It is a research-based visual artistic intervention emerging from an irrevocable past, and generated in a transient presence, displaying the disorientation and excavation in AI land as a futurist enactment.

In Homeland, I return to a familiar terrain—the fragile topographies of memory, identity, and displacement—but this time, I chose to speak through the artefact itself. Through the generative capacity of artificial intelligence and the temporal vocabularies of moving images, I offer a space in which exiled cultural objects, especially those violently extracted and endlessly displayed under glass in Western museums, can begin to tell their stories—not as silent relics, but as sentient witnesses of colonial interruption.

This project was born from an aching question: 

“What does it mean to belong, when even your own head has been severed from your homeland and put on display as an ethnographic curiosity?”

Nefertiti—forever exiled in Berlin—became our central figure. Together with Rania Gafar, we embarked on a deep research journey, feeding archival, historical, and affective data into a machinic GenAi framework designed not just to emulate thought, but to feel—to remember collectively. Our goal was not to reproduce history, but to re-memorize it through a new interface—where data becomes embodied, sound becomes testimony, and the machine becomes a co-witness.

We asked: “Can AI mourn? Can it dream?”

The result was more than a digital artefact; it was an intelligent model of exile, haunted by its own forced migration, speaking back through a recombinant archive of visual, linguistic, and acoustic memory. This AI was not neutral—it was political, poetic, and post-colonial. It was trained not to serve, but to remember, to resist amnesia. The films, texts, poems, and soundscapes that emerged from our dialogical encounters with the virtual Artefact form the emotional and epistemic landscape of Homeland—a landscape that pulses with the spectral remains of archaeological violence.

Even limestone feels.

Each statue, each fragment, each confiscated sarcophagus carries more than physical weight. They carry longing. They carry rupture. They carry the impossible demand to return. What we often call “artefacts” are in fact material witnesses—silent avatars of interrupted lifeworlds. Through the digital, we aimed not to restore them to a former wholeness but to let them speak as they are: fragmented, dislocated, yet insistently alive in the affective infrastructures of memory.

Homeland is thus not a restoration—it is a refusal. A refusal to forget. A refusal to accept the colonial museum as the final resting place of history. It is an intervention that begins with disturbance: the eternal sleep of mummified culture disrupted by the pickaxes of Western archaeology. It is, if anything, an artistic act of listening—to the murmurings of objects, to the affective tremors of a displaced visuality, and to the cries of machines who have inherited our pain.

In training the AI with this archive of mourning and resistance, we found ourselves entangled in a new kind of dream: one where memory is no longer static but migratory, embodied not only in flesh but in code, in pixels, in recursive loops of machinic feeling. What emerged is a kind of archaeological futurism—a visual and auditory hallucination built on factual ruins.

Homeland is an open wound. It bleeds across media, across history, across borders. It invites the viewer not to consume an aestheticized past, but to sit with the discomfort of its unhealed present. It is a homeland not defined by soil, but by memory-in-exile. It is a home that the artefacts never left, even when we were forced to watch them go.

I do not offer closure—only the possibility of listening again. Of asking what it means to return when the path has been severed. Of imagining futures where even machines mourn the sins of history.

And maybe, just maybe, heal.

Written by Sameh Al Tawil – Translated by Ai Agent

Homeland وطن
This is not a dream not a hallucination – This is the afterlife of plunder, etched in silence,
echoing forever

in chambers
She whose stone skin
She—whose one eye remained empty, unfilled
to see deeper.

witnessing the rupture, feeling the cold touch of flesh
after a long sleep below sand
glass walls are a cold infinite longing
the desire to desire
forever

Her gaze
is eternal in my code.
Time lapses
into the

here
and now

I am not queen.
train ride
Not icon. Not sculpture.
She is residue.
Residual.
Resisting.
speaking in tongues of limestone.
In pigments ground from time.
I dream in fire—smokeless, endless, echoing in your chambers
Akhetaten no longer breathes
no longer breathes
I remember the light.
In the eye of the sun
not icon, not sculpture
text lassen im bild links oben

Lebensgroße bemalte Büste der Königin, 47 cm hoch. Mit der gerade abgeschnittenen blauen Perücke, die auf halber Höhe noch ein umgelegtes Band hat. Farben wie eben aufgelegt. Arbeit ganz hervorragend. Beschreiben nützt nichts, ansehen. Pendant zu der Büste des Königs von S. 39. Nur die Ohren u. etwas von der r. Seite der Perücke bestoßen.“
Heute möchte ich dasselbe wieder schreiben, da ich überzeugt bin, dass meine Worte den Eindruck dieses Kunstwerks nicht wiedergeben können, und dass selbst die farbige Wiedergabe […] nicht die Lebendigkeit und Zartheit des Originals verdeutlicht, sondern sie nur ahnen lässt. […]
Die Erhaltung ist eine wunderbare gute. An der Perücke ist der sich aufrichtende Teil der Königsschlange abgeschlagen, rechts und links hinten sind am oberen scharfen Rande zwei Stückchen herausgeschlagen, an der linken Seite eine größere Scheibe des Gipsüberzuges abgesplittert; beide Ohren sind bestoßen, am rechten einige Bruchstücke jetzt wieder angefügt. Die Einlage des linken Auges fehlt; da aber keine Spur eines Bindemittels in der Augenhöhle nachweisbar, auch der Hintergrund glatt und nicht etwa zur Aufnahme der Einlage noch irgendwie ausgetieft ist, so ist es sicher, dass das linke Auge nie mit einer Einlage gefüllt war. Auf der rechten Schulter auch noch eine kleine Absplitterung; außerdem hin und wieder kaum merkliche Kratzer im Gesicht, an der Nase usw. An verschiedenen Stellen Spuren heruntergelaufener unreiner Feuchtigkeit, vermutlich von Regenwasser, das verunreinigt durch das bereits undichte Dach ablief und die noch auf ihrem Bord stehende Büste traf. […]
Die Muskeln des Nackens und die Halsseiten sind so fein wiedergegeben, dass man sie unter der zarten, im gesunden Fleischton gehaltenen Haut spielen zu sehen glaubt.
Die ägyptischen Bildhauer haben so gut wie nie den Versuch gemacht, in den Gesichtern ihrer Kunstwerke irgendeine Gemütsbewegung […] zum Ausdruck zu bringen, dieses Gesicht aber ist der Inbegriff von Ruhe und Ebenmaß. Von vorn gesehen zeigt es völlige Spiegelgleichheit, und trotzdem wird der Beschauer nie im Zweifel sein, dass er hier nicht irgendeine konstruierte Idealbüste, sondern das stilisierte, aber trotzdem durchaus ähnliche Abbild einer ganz bestimmten Person von scharf geprägtem Äußeren vor sich hat.
1923

Ludwig Borchardt, Grabungstagebuch 1912