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Rabia

Susu Laroche

Rābiʼa al-ʼAdawiyya of Basra (d. 801) occupies a singular place within the history of early Islamic mysticism. An ascetic, teacher, and poet, she became the nucleus of a devotional tradition organised around an uncompromising proposition that God should be loved neither from fear of punishment nor in anticipation of reward, but without guarantee or an ulterior end. Almost everything popularly told about her lies somewhere between history, oral memory and hagiography. Tradition recounts that Rabia was orphaned, separated from her family, sold into slavery, and eventually freed after her master witnessed a miraculous light suspended above her as she prayed through the night. The historical Rabia remains partially obscured by the hagiographic repertoire that accumulated around her. This film does not attempt to resolve that obfuscation through historical portraiture; rather, it takes as its locus of activity the more difficult inheritance of her thought, asking what devotion becomes when pursued beyond exchange, beyond utility, and perhaps beyond the stable distinction between the one who loves and the object of love… What is made distinct is utterly brutal and what is repeated acquires a benign quality. Across its eighteen-minute duration, this single-channel work assembles image, drone, gesture, and recurrence into a closed repertoire. The work administers repetition as devotional practice does, bearing some relation to the structure of dhikr, remembrance enacted through the recurrent invocation of the divine names, phrases, breaths, and gestures. Throughout the work, a vertical instability recalls the loss of synchronisation between the vertical oscillator of a cathode-ray display and the sync pulse embedded within a transmitted signal. The frame rolls. The body slips beyond one edge of the screen and returns through another. Yet nothing has left the signal. The image remains present while losing its guarantee of position, all the while refusing to remain fixed within its own demarcation. Prayer, sound and light are disclosed within a single apparatus employing aspects of the same technology.  Pitch bends and drifts, destabilising the expectation of fixed temperament. Frequencies aggregate, compound until sound can no longer be perceived as accompaniment. The salient question becomes not what the repeated gesture represents, but what repetition permits it to become – recurrence as a means of altering relation. A word may be repeated until its semantic boundary begins to weaken. A gesture may recur until its symbolic function is exhausted. An image may roll until the frame no longer appears capable of containing it. This malfunction establishes a technical analogue for the work's wider devotional structure. The image repeatedly departs from the site assigned to it. It flees without escape. It returns without resolution. Synchronisation is continually lost and continually sought. A passage, perhaps, should be understood this way. Within Sufi practice, repetition does not merely reiterate information. It renews attention. It returns the practitioner again and again to that which is understood never to have been absent. Film and sound by Susu Laroche. Featuring Sandhaya Tamu and Jess Maybury. Text by Alexandre Montserrat.
Country: Egypt/France
Time: 18
Year: 2025