Malaz Usta
Malaz Usta is a Syrian artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. His practice spans film, performance, installation and the written diary, exploring time, exile and the poetics of waiting. Working with personal archives, home videos, 3D simulations, sound and text, he constructs fragmented worlds where memory and imagination intertwine. Through recording, editing and layering, his works reflect on displacement as both a lived condition and a way of seeing. He uses intimate daily gestures and observations to explore belonging, uncertainty, absurdity and the fragile architectures of existence.
"Why don’t the numbers go down? unfolds between film, performance, and installation, reflecting on the temporality of exile and the endlessness of waiting. In this work, I merge personal archives, fragments of family life and virtual terrains across three projected channels: numbers, diary and a constructed 3D world, creating a shifting spatial poem. The voice reading the poem echoes through the space like an internal monologue caught between bureaucratic loops and fading memories. The number keeps rising, refusing resolution, mirroring the systems that measure, delay, and define existence. Through repetition and layering, I invite the audience to inhabit the in-between of presence and absence, belonging and dislocation, and reflect on what it means to keep waiting when waiting becomes a way of being.”