Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work together. Ayreen writes in fragments, and makes films and videos. She is interested in philosophy, literature, the political and the everyday. Rene is interested in the complex mechanisms that constitute the world. He works within the folds of cultural practice, social thought and politics. Ayreen and Rene’s collaborative projects have evolved a great deal through their frequent contributions to the programme at 16Beaver ¹ .

We first came across Ayreen and Rene’s work via Anthony Iles at Mute, and then their book The Meaning of Everything, which Ayreen and Rene write quite beautifully about as one manifestation of their own research, a series of notes, questions, diagrams, and drawings, which trace or map the questions they share in the course of their work and life:

“One cannot say with precision what each of the books in the series will be about, nor what form they will take, as the life that will write them has yet to be lived…an attempt to give form to, and make public, the intellectual and affective movements or ‘becomings’, which constitute a life…the series will, at times, act as a script which can open up to events, actions, performances, videos, texts, gestures, and other unforeseeable incidents.”

I want to go without you: fiction in the absence of proper names may very well be one such incident: a kind of “porous space between cinema time-space and lived time-space,” another moment in their ongoing research…

Rene and Ayreen spent a week in a flat near the CCA constructing their performance which was fed direct to the cinema audience from their flat space.