Hard Stone

Hard Stone (2025)

In Sange Khara, commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal, Laila Hida offers a landscape where memory is not narrated, but circled – tentatively, tenderly, with the gravity of something sacred and half-forgotten. The project stages a kind of poetic inquiry where images seem to emerge from a re-constructed memory anchored by a 16mm film and expanded through an immersive installation. Characters cross paths, brought together through a tapestry of iconographic and cinematic references: the young woman from The Wanderers of the Desert (1984), the couple in The Sheltering Sky (1990). Two young guys ride their bikes and strike poses on a dirt road as if freshly cast in a rap video summoning an apparition, a construct of a landscape, the desert, the oasis, and the people who inhabit them, filtered through cinema and image.

Director: Laila Hida

Casts

	Niki Kohandel as Isabelle Eberhardt / The daughter of the Cheikh / The singer
	Othman El Kheloufi as The Master of Sound
	Carlos Pérez Marín as The spanish explorator
	Oli Bonzanigo as Kit Moresby
	Jake Wiener as Port Moresby
	Ilyass Dabbah as Biker with green cheche
	Oussama Affani as Biker with brown cheche
	Lahbib Bellayni as The seller
	Hassan Ouayour as The voice calling Oussama

Crew