Interference International · 2021–2022 · Festival

Interference Light Art Festival

Two editions of the first light art festival in Tunisia and Africa, as technical partner and trainer, and in 2022 as an exhibiting artist with STOMATA DREAMS.

INTERFERENCE is an international exhibition project dedicated to contemporary art using light as its medium, deployed across sites in the Medina of Tunis. Founded in 2016 under the curatorship of Bettina Pelz and Aymen Gharbi, it is the first light art festival on the African continent. The walls and contours of the historic quarter become the ground for works that hold a conversation with traditional architecture. FMRXR contributes across two editions and on three fronts: interactive technical support for exhibiting artists, training, and visual production. An infrastructure contribution as much as an authorial one, on a festival carried by a largely volunteer team. STOMATA DREAMS · Photosynthesis is a storytelling In 2022 FMRXR also exhibited at Interference as an artist, in the Young Masters Programme. Photosynthesis is the process that makes the planet habitable, and almost nobody has ever seen it. STOMATA DREAMS takes the organisms that run it, the microscopic life in water and in leaves, and gives them a scale a body can stand inside. The piece was built for Kishlet El Morjeni, a vaulted hall in the Medina. Its striped arches became the surface: generative forms grow across the stone, cell structures open and close, chloroplasts catch light and release oxygen, and the whole cycle runs at the speed of a room rather than a microscope. The work is deliberately double. One half follows the organisms, the other follows us, the part of the cycle that is easiest to forget and hardest to undo. Seeing the process at architectural scale is the argument: what is invisible is not therefore small. The festival in augmented reality For the communication of the 2022 edition, FMRXR also designed an augmented reality face effect in Spark AR, the Instagram and Facebook camera tool: a face-tracked effect carrying the INTERFERENCE title and looping 3D neon elements, so the festival identity could be worn rather than only seen. It was developed for the campaign and never published. Artist's accomplices: Arij Bouchami and Hajer Allani.