I

21.08.2018
Santiago, Chile

Everything I know about you, I’ve learned from stories I’ve been told. I remember hearing Al-Makhrour through my cousins. They always talk about you as if you were a kind of paradise.

Labibe is the sister of my grandfather. She, together with her sister Sofia, are the last people in the Khamis family from the first generation of Palestinians in Chile. Labibe speaks Spanish with an Arabic texture. Her accent is strong and she still uses some words from her mother tongue.

Being here in Amsterdam, I decided to call Nicole, my second cousin, Labibe’s granddaughter. I asked her to record some conversations with her grandmother after having lunch together, or in any situation where she felt comfortable talking about her story. Nicole made audio recordings and began sending them to me. From then on I received the voice of Labibe: Audios para la memoria.

From those audios, I started memorizing and trying to say the exact same words as Labibe. That is how the performances started. It couldn’t be a video, the fragility of memory had to be exposed. I mixed up the words and had to start again until I could say the story in the same way Labibe said it to us.

PHOTO: Documentation of the performance
Umeå, Sweden
May, 2019

In the performances with Tina Reden and Davide Sanvee, we create various collective imaginaries based on different memories and experiences of displacement. Following traditions of oral storytelling, we think of different ways to tell and share stories and to remember, hold on, and rewrite memories - ours, tour family members, and other ancestral voices. Through the crossing and mixing of our remembrance, we create a new, ever-changing narrative, new relations, and a collective memory. Starting from the performances, we also developed a close reading and experimental workshop on (in)visibility, decolonizing the sense of time and the task of Listening.

PHOTO: Documentation of the performance in HMK
Hoorn, Netherlands
June, 2019

After I started asking for the audios and talking with people from my family about the importance of the stories of Labibe, we decided to make a video of her telling the stories. The creation of this video was also a collaboration, this time with my cousins. This video was made in Chile, in the Palestinian social club. I was here in Amsterdam while my cousins organized everything there. The video is 2 hours long, just one shot of Labibe surrounded by one representative from each family (second generation of Palestinians in Chile). Here, she has all the attention, space, and time to be listened to.

IN TRANSITION BETWEEN WORLDS
Performances and workshops,
2018-today

REUNION
6:07 min(excerpt)
2019

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People do not usually speak in paragraphs, and what they have to say does not usually follow an ordered sequence of comma, semi-colon, and full stop; yet very often this is the way in which their speech is reproduced. In Oral Tradition, many of the shifts that are experienced or dreamed are translated in an effort to build continuity, a common sense.
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