Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, When the fall of the dictionary leaves all the words lying in the street (Part 3 of The Incidental Insurgents), Video Still, 2015.
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the ones who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear*
Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, Screenshot 2015-05-11 16.15.11, 19×12 inches, archival pigment ink print.
Courtesy of the artists
The clearing. We find ourselves in the wreck, once again and then again. A perpetual crisis that leaves us suspended at ground zero. The potential to radically re-imagine the world that seemed so palpable only a blink of an eye ago now tastes bitter in our mouths. But isn’t this theatre of continual crisis the imaginary of power and counter-insurgencies.
So how is it that places, things, our imaginary dies? And how do we go on then, retrieve and reconstitute living matter from the wreck.
Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, Screenshot 2015-08-07 16.52.06, 19×12 inches, archival pigment ink print.
Courtesy of the artists.
And now to return to the wreck itself, to return to cast a new projection, to palpably feel the potential of an unrealized time.
I returned there. Where I had never been. Nothing has changed from how it wasn’t.
Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, Screenshot 2015-08-14 19.28.36, 19×12 inches, archival pigment ink print.
Courtesy of the artists.
* Poem by Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ in Diving Into The Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Reissue edition, August 17, 1994)
** And yet my mask is powerful (2016) is co-produced by Caroll/Fletcher with the support of SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016. The research is co-produced by The Kamel Lazaar Foundation.
