Basmah Felemban

Originally commissioned for Desert X AlUla 2024, curated by Maya El Khalil and Marcello Dantas.

The valley and Basmah Felemban had been calling for each other a long time before their first interaction. She came here surveying, much like the Jirry tribe of catfish she writes about; wandering creatures that mine data from the land to guide their travels. Their elders teach that every pebble carries a memory of motion carved by floods, smoothed by collisions, and molded by the push and pull of time. From holding and rolling a single pebble in their hand, a Jirry can read the history of the valley's waters and winds.

She sees sediments as memory units. A pebble's shape is a field report. The number and distribution of its equilibrium points reveal how repeatedly it was rolled or stabilized. Flattened faces indicate prolonged contact with the ground or other stones, while elongated forms suggest directional transport. Subtle imbalances in curvature record cycles of collision, rest, and reactivation, allowing the pebble's form itself to speak of motion, duration, and change.

Being a mythmaker means she is inevitably an ecologist, so when she stood in the valley and held a pebble in her hand, she found a record of the history of its evolution. The sandstone mountains as riverbeds, pushed upward by tectonic force, with pebbles that once rolled along the bottom of flowing water becoming trapped inside vertical cliffs. Wind carving the sandstone until these thousands-of-years-old pebbles emerged again, falling and leaving cavities behind, slowly eroding into what are known as tafonis.

Both the pebble and this cavity are calculators of time. The Jirry and Felemban leave this knowledge as an offering to the valley and its creatures, to navigate the land through feeling its sediments. We invite you to approach the valley slowly and with curiosity, as it speaks in fragments and murmurs, and the act of listening is a response to its call.