Speak, Mnemosyne

 An Ocean of Words and some Middle-Grounds.

“Parce que leur mémoire est courte, les hommes accumulent d’innombrables pense-bêtes”

“Because their memory is short, men accumulate countless reminders”

‘Toute la Mémoire du monde’ – Alain Resnais 1956

This project consists of a series of sculptures and drawings, ‘pense-bêtes’ - ‘reminders’, poetic images made out of book pages, prints, ceramic, textile, paper and wax, in which words are essential; Woven words, engraved words, words as drawing, words as knitwork, words on book pages; words as the cartography and the architecture of our identity.

During the first months of lockdown, I began to explore this subject which had interested me before, but that I wished to address from a more personal point of view; my relationship to language and identity and the role that remembering and forgetting have had in the process of modeling and reconstructing my identity in exile. Through this series of artworks, I am interested in reflecting on my emotional relationship with language(s), which I imagine as an intimate and deep as an ocean. In the infinite cartography of our identity, words become maps and constellations of meaning, which constitute an important part of who we are. There are places made of words, or memories, which, forgotten or unknown, are invisible to us, others which constitute intermediate territories, territories of understanding, where we are able to "translate ourselves”. I also wished to considered the relationship of language with biological processes scientifically related to learning, recalling and obliterating, such as sleeping and dreaming.

Language is one of the least noticeable, yet strongest links between our “internal life” and who we are, and the way we function in the “outside world”. Whenever we move to a new territory, physically or emotionally, we carry with us the baggage of experience that is stored in the form of sensory and verbal memories. Images, feelings, voices, and words are all memories that constitute part of our identity and in this way the language or languages with which we grow up are essential underpinning elements in our individuality continuously ‘under-construction’. Language take a dynamic part in shaping our individual vision of the world and are the medium of our interactions with people around us. They serve as ‘filters’ between the others and us. Yet, we truly realize the importance of language when the link between the world and our internal linguistic representation of it is severed or called into question. This can happen when we leave our homeland and enter a new life in a new language. Regardless of what pushes us to leave our “familiar territory” to go in exile, a notion that nowadays is much more broadly understood, there is one thing all displaced, “shifted” individuals take along with us, and that is our language(s). Language comes with a representation of our surrounding reality, our native culture and our verbal traditions and beliefs such as old proverbs and idiomatic expressions.

I have many times felt “lost in translation”. Spanish, is my mother tongue. English, is the language in which I did all my scholar years from kindergarten to high school, and it represents a father tongue and an academic language to me. I learned French during my early pre-adolescence, and it is the language I have lived in for the past 10 years. French nourishes me intellectually and has become in a way my language of thought. Arabic, the long-lost language, symbolizes my quest for my Lebanese origins, which constitutes an important part of my identity and part of my work. It represents all the memory lost when this language was not transmitted by my grandparent to their children. A gap in my family history and identity that I try to mend as I slowly learn this once secrete tongue.

Though some aspects of our identity might be forever lost in translation, a lot about ourselves might be found or rediscovered, hence the loss might turn into reconstruction.  In the on-going process of creating a new linguistic mapping from thoughts and emotions to words, these languages have become a way for me to constantly invent and explore my own voice.  I am always on the way to my “linguistic home”.