Michael Maurissens & Basma Eletreby

At the Saari Residence, choreographer and filmmaker Michael Maurissens (Belgium) along with artist and researcher Basma Eletreby (Egypt) will work on their research project ‘The One and the Many’. The project is an artistic development of Basma’s MA thesis entitled ‘A Universe of Mirrors: The Mirror Metaphor in Ibn ʿArabī’s Thought in Relation to Ontology, Knowledge, and Perfection,’ which discusses the relationship between Creator and creation from an Islamic Sufi perspective.

The project is an attempt to uncover the voice of the sacred beneath layers of teachings, dogma, and politics. It aims to enliven the ways in which we perceive and interact with life, or simply remind of a deep knowing that used to exist, but seems to have been abandoned. By revealing the reflective nature of the Creator-creation relationship, the work opens a space for human questioning of purpose, origin, and return.

At its heart, the project resists the reduction of religion to dogma and spirituality to marketable identity. Instead, it insists on the mystery, multiplicity, and interiority of the sacred experience. Artistically, it aligns with a growing movement in contemporary art and performance that seeks to reunite the aesthetic with the spiritual, the poetic with the political.

During the residency, Basma’s work shall flow between research, script writing, storyboard development. Through the combination of a research-based creative process, and hands-on experimentation with the camera in a new environment, the story shall reveal itself in a new guise. Her work is to traverse between the academic and scholarly works on the one hand, and the more poetic, profoundly relatable, and longed for representations of these ideas on the other, and from this merging, create the skeleton for the film.

Michael’s research lies at the intersection of choreography, filmmaking, and Islamic philosophy, exploring how movement and image can embody spiritual and metaphysical ideas. Through the embodiment of spiritual concepts such as reflection, unity, and transformation, he approaches dance as a form of contemplation and film as a space for revelation. The use of allegory in visual storytelling allows abstract philosophical notions to become sensorial and intimate experiences, bridging the visible and the invisible.

Basma Eletreby is an Egyptian researcher and creative writer in the field of Islamic Studies. She finished a BA in Mass Communication and Media Arts, with minor studies in Psychology, Art, and Creative Writing from The American University in Cairo (AUC). She then earned an MA in Islamic Studies, with a focus on Sufism, and particularly the ideas of Greatest Master Muhy al-Din Ibn Arabi. Her artistic interests extend between writing, painting, and dancing. Her poems were published in the anthology ‘And we All Breathe The Same Air’ (2019). She performed in the dance film 間 [Ma] – The Space in Between (2023), as well as the live performance ‘Would You Rather Be..’ (2024). Her artistic and intellectual curiosities revolve around mythology, spirituality, religion, and the lived human experience.

Michael Maurissens is a Belgian choreographer, filmmaker, and cultural practitioner based in Cologne, Germany. After a career in contemporary dance, he shifted toward visual media, developing an interdisciplinary practice that merges movement, film, and site-responsive research.

Through his lens, Michael reveals what is often invisible: emotional landscapes, social ruptures, ancestral rhythms, and metaphysical presence., viewing dance and movement as a dynamic space where the body negotiates, connects, and expresses fluid forms, embodying the evolution of socially diverse societies across the globe. Over the past two decades, his work has been presented at festivals, biennials, and cultural institutions across Europe, Asia, Africa, USA and the Middle East. He has collaborated with choreographers, visual artists, musicians, and communities worldwide, working in contexts marked by cultural transition and layered histories. His practice navigates between the poetic and the political, crafting works that connect intimate experience to wider cultural narratives.