HUMBABA’S WOMB: MYTHOLOGIES OF FEAR
Performance and Multimedia Installationat Emancipation of the Living / Emancipação do Vivente Exhibition
Curatied by the Museum for the Displaced
at Galeria Municipal de Almada.
1.
Who protects you? I ask this question to what remains of the green spaces of Lebanon, suffering from political pollution towards people and land. My quest begins with an observation: a wave of people who, like me, amidst the many crises of the recent years, are leaving the city, back to land. When the systems that have held us (or so it seemed) collapse, we are forced to find new ground to stand on. Could this movement back to land open for us the opportunity to regenerate our landscapes, or could this simply become a continuation of the exploitation, an extension of the corrosive, built environments and vanishing ecologies?
They answered:Humbaba the ancient being, protector of the cedar forest, Humbaba the beast feared to death by all, so feared that he was slaughtered, and the whole forest slaughtered, for the gates of the city to rise.
The spirit of wilderness, a force so powerful that we embodied it as a beast and conquered it- in the same way we conquer darkness, the feminine, the indigenous, and otherness. Could the root of separation be our fears? How we relate to land is how we relate to each other, and the futures we co-create depend intrinsically on how we perceive these relationships.
*Photos Courtsey of Patricia Black
2.
The City’s Hidden Excrements
(Video, 2022)
This footage,shot incognito, is of illegal sand extraction on the Lebanese coast polluted with raw sewage, destroying ecosystems and putting the shoreline at risk.
In an endless defiance of people’s right to public space, this sight degraded from one of the most popular beaches in the 70s to another inaccessible site of corruption.
*Installed in collaboration with Rami Chahine
*Photos Courtsey of Patricia Black
Poems
Isolation.
The body calls
lacking nurture
in the vacuum of walls.
The senses hungry
to touch
to breathe beyond
surface sensations
of food without soul,
air without substance,
water that is stale.
Pores dry, forget how to function or heal roots
bound in a pot, un-infinite.
The infinite lineage preceding
buried in concrete drawers, deprived to disintegrate
back into the earth that birthed it.
The rule of energy is such:
that which you put attention to, grows.
The body calls
lacking nurture
in the vacuum of walls.
The senses hungry
to touch
to breathe beyond
surface sensations
of food without soul,
air without substance,
water that is stale.
Pores dry, forget how to function or heal roots
bound in a pot, un-infinite.
The infinite lineage preceding
buried in concrete drawers, deprived to disintegrate
back into the earth that birthed it.
The rule of energy is such:
that which you put attention to, grows.
Confrontation.
It can be easy to romanticize
her scent, changing faces, and deep greens;
It can be easy to blame ourselves, as monsters destroying her soils,
to forget sometimes,
that the slightest shift in her sleep is an earthquake wiping out cities built by our biggest machines.
To reconcile, we approach, she brings forth tests
thorns underneath bare feet,
ticks and snakes on naked skin, thunder and winds that blow away our make-shift shelters.
Alone, against the night in a darkened forest, unknown, howling, can we pace our breath?
Dear fear, I say,
I see you.
I ask you to connect me
To what has separated us from love.
It can be easy to romanticize
her scent, changing faces, and deep greens;
It can be easy to blame ourselves, as monsters destroying her soils,
to forget sometimes,
that the slightest shift in her sleep is an earthquake wiping out cities built by our biggest machines.
To reconcile, we approach, she brings forth tests
thorns underneath bare feet,
ticks and snakes on naked skin, thunder and winds that blow away our make-shift shelters.
Alone, against the night in a darkened forest, unknown, howling, can we pace our breath?
Dear fear, I say,
I see you.
I ask you to connect me
To what has separated us from love.
The Sacrifice.
There are those who believe we are powerless, and that there is no other way--
but to dominate, to set us free from weakness, to conquer, to defeat and not be defeated, to enslave and not be the slaves building towers, of convenience, banquets of feasts, bottomless pits, we must destroy everything else, step on all life that takes space from us, (it gets heated) to choose ourselves over others, to choose our life over others. (it starts boiling) We, conquerors of the earth! And when we defeat earth, we conquer mars–
(The egg falls from my bosom and breaks and there is silence.)
He looks into my eyes as I hide the tears. I am sorry, he says. It’s not you, I say, I lost my egg. He says, I am sorry. In his heart he knows feelings, and for my egg that died, he felt.
There are those who believe we are powerless, and that there is no other way--
but to dominate, to set us free from weakness, to conquer, to defeat and not be defeated, to enslave and not be the slaves building towers, of convenience, banquets of feasts, bottomless pits, we must destroy everything else, step on all life that takes space from us, (it gets heated) to choose ourselves over others, to choose our life over others. (it starts boiling) We, conquerors of the earth! And when we defeat earth, we conquer mars–
(The egg falls from my bosom and breaks and there is silence.)
He looks into my eyes as I hide the tears. I am sorry, he says. It’s not you, I say, I lost my egg. He says, I am sorry. In his heart he knows feelings, and for my egg that died, he felt.
3.
Gallery Opening: Particapatory Performance