Ahmed Maghari, The Last Step Archipelago, 2025
Ahmed Maghari, The Last Step Archipelago, 2025
The Last Step Archipelago is a video art piece that represents the workings of fragility, where play is shifted from its innocent function to a cognitive effect that undermines the concept of stability. Here, space is not a theatre for action, but rather a surface for negotiating presence, where memory intersects with loss in a network of incomplete gestures.
In the centre of the void, the child plays her game as a ritual to deconstruct the world, drawing imaginary squares with white chalk on the wall of air, as if recoding the earth as a prehistoric geometry of absence, attempting to jump between the squares to an ontology of movement within nothingness. Here, hopscotch is not a game, but a physical thinking device that redefines the relationship between step and limit, between staying and disappearing. Erasure does not come as an act of negation, but as a procedure to reproduce meaning within its void, transforming the childish body into a tool for encoding the ontology of disappearance.
This work was created as part of Sahab Urgent Grant Program 2025.
