Residencies

• 19.10 > 21.10.2026

How can we descri­be our bodies if we have no lan­gu­a­ge? In Arabic, ḥoub means ​‘love in all its forms’. The root ح ب ب (‘ḥbb’) refers to the seed, the core, that which car­ries life within itself. The Houb of the tit­le stands for a sis­ter­ly dia­lo­gue bet­ween the poe­try of Zaïneb Ḥamdi and the turn­ta­blism prac­ti­ce of Soumaya Phéline Abouda. 

Drawing from her poe­try col­lec­ti­on Où mon amour sera houb*, Zaïneb Hamdi expres­ses urgent issues that enga­ge both artists: the reap­prop­ri­a­ti­on of non-whi­te bodies, their lan­gu­a­ges and his­to­ry, wit­h­dra­wal from the ​‘sys­tems of the Fathers’, and the rejec­ti­on of any essen­ti­a­li­za­ti­on used as an instru­ment of power. Houb unfolds the­se poe­tic words in sce­nes, some­whe­re bet­ween con­fes­si­ons and incan­ta­ti­ons. Like an echo, the live orches­tra­ted music behind the turn­ta­bles beco­mes a full-fled­ged nar­ra­ti­ve that decon­structs and com­po­ses voi­ces, tex­tu­res, and sam­ples and gui­des the bre­ath of the poem. 

Zaïneb and Soumaya let a living lan­gu­a­ge flo­at bet­ween ora­li­ty and sounds bet­ween them. They call for dis­cur­si­ve plu­ra­li­ty by invi­ting a voi­ce from the world of poe­try onto the sta­ge at eve­ry per­for­man­ce, to allow a uni­que sto­ry – for the dura­ti­on of a text – to reso­na­te in the heart of the show. In a cir­cu­lar, sci­en­ce-fic­ti­on-like set­ting, Houb immer­ses the audien­ce in an artis­tic, sen­so­ry cross-pol­li­na­ti­on in which poe­try, music, and silen­ce pave the way for lis­te­ning and sha­red vibration.