Saeed Gebaan
VACUUM OF SELF
2026 Kinetic Installation Produced during the Intermix Residency Program at Cité internationale des arts, Paris, and presented at Open Studio Under the mentorship of Émilie Villez Face sculpted in collaboration with artist Céline Lallement
STATEMENT
How is a person formed by what they never understood?
We credit ourselves with what we know: our decisions, our convictions, whatever we can explain. But what shapes us precedes all of that. It reaches us before we have the means to understand it, settles beneath awareness, and works from there without consulting anyone. And when a whole generation passes through the same events, it becomes a generation that resembles itself in temperament, in what preoccupies it later, without knowing why. What happened to my generation through one window and one machine is happening now many times over: children into whose awareness wars are poured live, images that do not stop, events too far to understand and too close to avoid. The generation forming now is being formed by what none of us is noticing.
My research in Paris, drawing on Freud's unconscious, Le Bon's mass psychology, and Toffler's Future Shock .. arrived at this: the unconscious governs, and what we pass through in childhood is not a set of fleeting moments but building blocks in the formation of the individual and of the group.
The work is one living case. A Saudi living room of the 1990s, rebuilt from original pieces: furniture, a curtain, a window covered with plastic against chemical missiles, a vacuum cleaner on the floor. And a child holding its hose to his face, his face drawn in.
The scene is not a record of what happened. It is the rendering of an imagined state that stayed lodged in the unconscious: that the machine would take him inside. And the imagining was not his alone it was made with the tools of his time and its conceptions: what he had seen, what had worked on him, what he had come to believe in his era. A child interprets what he cannot understand through the images his time has handed him. That is why the face takes this form: not the shape of the fear, but the shape of the imagination that fear and curiosity made together.
The scene is not explained to the visitor. They are left before it, where perception arrives ahead of understanding at the same edge where a self is formed, silently, without permission.
THE WORK
A Saudi living room of the 1990s, rebuilt from original pieces: furniture of the period, a floral curtain, an old television, switched off. Behind the curtain the window is covered with plastic and tape. On the floor stands a 1980s vacuum cleaner, of the same kind my mother used, its sound running in the room. audible, without being intrusive.
The child sits on a small chair, holding the hose to his face.
The face is drawn in. Every feature pulls toward the nozzle, and the eyes move, searching. This is what I imagined at two: that it would suck me in, shrink me, take me inside. The face is that imagining, made.
His body is epoxy and resin; his face sculpted by hand, cast from a mould and rendered in rubber, hand-painted, with the eyebrow hair implanted. His hands were cast the same way. His hair is an implanted wig; his clothing and socks are of the period. And his eyes are programmed screens.
THE STORY BEHIND THE WORK
The Question the Work Began From
There was a curiosity about how every generation resembles itself, or how those close in age share behaviors and ways of living. Why does a generation move along one path from the beginning of adolescence, in fashion, in music, in habits and behaviors? And why those gaps between each generation we look at closely? Why do we see those younger than us as strangers, and those older as behind us? And why those feelings that take hold, as if we were in a race over superiority, or over the belief that what we lived through was the best?
The ancient Greek poet Hesiod writes:
"If only I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but had died before it or been born after."
What led him to judge his own generation in that collective image, and the generation after him in that same collective image? That provokes the question of why the character and patterns of those generations take shape. Generations are affected and come to resemble one another, as if they had programmed themselves without any will.
What the Work Explains
The work explains how the identity, patterns, and behaviors of each generation are formed.
What passes over a generation in childhood is not an event or a passing matter. It becomes a mark inside the self, inside the unconscious. It is what makes the composition of that generation. Event upon event upon event, forming in the end the identity, the character, and the behavior of that generation.
I am speaking here on the scale of a major event that affects every dimension: the economic, the political, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the technological, the legal, and others. The kind that leaves a scar in that generation.
Why This Work in Particular
In this work I represented an event and a large historical period that passed over my generation. I tried to make something out of that period, that moment, that feeling, that historical event: myself as a child in our living room, our window covered with black garbage bags and paper tape to keep out the air and the gases that might come from chemical missiles, my mother's vacuum cleaner on the floor. Trying to describe that state, that feeling, that general atmosphere. An event that describes that period and what we lived through of fear, apprehension, boldness, confronting fate, surrender, and will.
I attempted to bring forward an entirely personal event, but one that tells a story larger than me. What I did in that period, and its effect, and the surrounding factor influencing that feeling, is what was engraved in my memory without my permission. A single event that may be a cause for engraving its mark in the unconscious, and for explaining the effect of such events on the formation of my own unconscious. And I do not know what it planted in me without my knowing: it may be fear, apprehension, confrontation, defiance, surrender, waiting, and others.
Why This Form
What I did in that moment was to summon the atmosphere and feeling of that period. The work describes a historical event, and a state and an idea I acted out as a child because of the effect of that event, and it tries to let the viewer live that feeling, which may seem passing but is not. It may place before the viewer: apprehension, fear, caution, and the confrontation of fate. Something that calls for an attempt to understand it, to question it, to take it in. Is it a moment placed before people, but one that describes an event with its own weight in the formation of a generation?
The Making
The first difficulty was in representing the findings of the research, and what had been arrived at concerning how to make the work reach the viewer and how to carry the idea across.
I made several attempts and several experiments in sculpting the face. We sculpted the face three times and each time it failed, because it is a challenge to make the expression without distorting the features of the face.
Then came the experiments in producing the effect of apprehension and of programming, and the arrival at the understanding that the eyes are the part of the face most able to describe what a person is living inside. Programming them, controlling them, and making them move were among the difficult matters during the residency and the production.
In sourcing materials, I spent a month and a half searching for a flexible mannequin whose sitting position and movements could be controlled.
And there was also the reading, wide and scattering, an attempt to reach an answer that is difficult to reach, about the greatest of the factors and influences that act upon societies and individuals.
What I Want to Say
The unconscious, and what is passed through it, is never passing. It shapes us without our knowing, and we believe that this is us, that this is our character in its truth.
And we ask ourselves: am I truly like this, or is it that the fashion, the form, the pattern, the style of a generation, its general taste, its dreams, its ideas, its ambitions, its psyche, its music, and its character that the whole generation agrees upon, are as if something made and determined them without any of them realizing it. There is something in control. And there is something because of which, or through which, or upon which an entire generation was raised.
Does a person have will in the formation of his own identity, or does he not? That needs research.
PROCESS ARCHIVE
This installation grew out of a written inquiry I completed in 2026 during my Intermix residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, under the mentorship of Émilie Villez, titled The Shock of Change and the Formation of Contemporary Consciousness tracing how human personality takes shape in every era, drawing on Freud’s unconscious, Le Bon’s mass psychology, and Toffler’s “Future Shock.” The research led me to a conviction: that consciousness is only the surface of waking life, and that the unconscious runs deeper in determining personality and its origins; that it is the question not the answer about the realities we live that forms, in the unconscious, our characters and behaviors. I came to understand that what we pass through in childhood is never a set of fleeting moments, but building blocks in the formation of every individual, group, and generation a silent foundation lodged in the unconscious, that deepest governor of the self. Everything we live, alone or together, leaves its lasting mark on the shaping of identity and social behavior, even when we never perceive it. Read the full research →
CLOSING STATEMENT
The room exists now outside me ... its furniture, its curtain, its covered window, a child holding a hose to his face. I built it so that someone else could stand before it and feel something before knowing what it is. That feeling, and not the understanding that follows it, is what remains .
MATERIALS
The body: Epoxy and resin structure; face sculpted by hand, cast and rendered in rubber, hand-painted with implanted eyebrow hair; hands cast and finished the same way; implanted-hair wig; eyes made of programmed screens and lenses.
The setting: Original Saudi furniture of the 1990s, curtain, small chair, table, old television, period clothing and socks, plastic sheeting and tape on the window.
Machine and sound: Original 1980s vacuum cleaner, sound, fan.
Dimensions: Room installation, 4 × 5 m