Emily Jacir. In 2007, she won the Golden Lion here at the Venice Biennale for her work, “Material for a Film.” It was a large-scale installation based on the life of Palestinian writer Wael Zuaiter, who was assassinated near his home in Rome, Italy, by Israeli Mossad agents in 1972. For years, Emily has created groundbreaking art to capture the Palestinian experience and other issues. In 2001, she presented—titled “Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948.” The piece consisted of a large refugee tent with the names of 418 Palestinian villages embroidered on it. She later did a project called “ex libris,” that commemorated the approximately 30,000 books from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. Emily Jacir is speaking here at the Creative Time Summit as part of the Venice Biennale.
Emily Jacir talking:
Yesterday I spoke about a project I made for the 2009 Biennial called “Stazione,” which was a public intervention that was meant to take place on the 25 vaporetto stops, the vaporetto being the water bus line, the water bus stops, that runs through the heart of Venice. And what I did was I translated each of the names into Arabic and placed the Arabic names next to the Italian, creating a bilingual transportation route into the city. And what inspired this project was a two-year period of researching the history of Venice, when it was really interdependent with the rest of the Mediterranean, and I was interested in exploring the heritage, the shared heritage, Venice shares with the Arab world. So, for example, the very first book ever printed, mechanically printed in Arabic, was called the Book of Hours, and it was printed here in Venice—I think it’s 1514—by Gregorio de Gregorii. Another highlight from that research was the first mechanically printed Qur’an in the world was printed here in Venice by Alessandro and Paganino Paganini in 1537. And the glassblowing technique that Venice is so famous for was actually developed in Palestine.
the technique of glassblowing, because this was from a period where there was all this exchange. The border—there was no borders. Venice was like a liquid city. So it’s a shared heritage, all of this. There are words in the Venetian dialect that come from Arabic. For example, where the summit is being held, the Arsenale, it comes from the Arabic word dar al-sina’a, which means “house of manufacture.” So it’s really, really, really an incredibly rich and layered history. The architecture, if you take vaporetto line one,
The vaporetto is the water bus that you take to move around the city. It’s the bus. It’s like a bus in any city, but it’s the water bus.
Biennale, Arsenale, San Marco. And the stops are actually these separate floating kind of platforms jutting out into the water. So the idea also of putting the Arabic next to the Italian was so that the stops would have a dialogue with the architecture along the Grand Canal, which is this incredible mixture of influences from the Arab world and here.
we worked with the vaporetto company that’s in charge of all the lines and the bus stops, and they were really excited about the project, and they were going to fund the project, actually. And they had asked me to create a text to explain to tourists, to put on some of the stops why—what is this Arabic that is on these stations. And we were going to have an opening with the mayor of Venice. But then, shortly before the Biennale, the project was shut down.
The city officials. Somebody came to the head of the vaporetto company and told them that this was not to take place in Venice, which was really devastating for me because I think it’s a very important project dealing with a beautiful history, a shared history, a shared cultural heritage, and it was a secular project, which is also something that’s very important.
It was the first Palestinian Pavilion. So what I did instead is I created—after this happened, I had to come up with something else. I created a brochure, which was a map of the project and where Biennial goers, or whoever, could follow this map and go see my project. And when they arrived, they would discover it wasn’t there, with my intention being that maybe sometime in the future people will think it was there, because I created this brochure that it actually happened, when it didn’t. It was the only way to overcome this.
Arsenale is interesting because it’s one of the things that I was talking about with the translation, because it was the place where ship building took place and where this word, dar al-sina’a, comes from, which is “house of manufacture” in Arabic. It was one of the first industrial assembly lines where they made warships. A warship in a day.
Golden Lion award for at the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2008 winning the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim.
that project was about the first Palestinian, named Wael Zuaiter, who was killed by the Israeli Mossad on European soil, in 1972. The title for that project comes from the chapter of a book written by Janet Venn-Brown, who was his companion for eight years. There was a chapter called “Material for a Film,” where Elio Petri, the famous Italian filmmaker, and Ugo Pirro had done a series of interviews with the people who knew Wael. Wael was very important in the cultural scene in Italy. He was the first person to bring Alberto Moravia to the Middle East. He took him to Iraq and Syria, Kuwait. And he was very involved with people like Pasolini. The Italian filmmaker, Pasolini. So, this chapter—basically, I felt that I was building on their work and gathering more material for a film. So what the installation ends up being is not only about Wael, but also about my journey in finding him and the traces he left behind.
I lived in Rome for many years, so there was always this specter of his death in my mind since I was a child, of this kind of impending threat. And to make that project, it actually required that I did a lot of research—it took five years—and collaborated mainly with Janet Venn-Brown, who, as I said before, was his companion. And frankly, we wouldn’t really have any information on him or his life if it wasn’t for her, because she kept every single documents, every single letter, all of his books. She held onto them. So, a lot of the work was working with her in her apartment, going through her archives, to create this piece. She was an Australian painter living in Rome.
What I intended to do was, I wanted it to function like you were walking through a film about this man and his life, and my life, except unlike a film, where if you’re watching a film, you’re in a very passive position and almost being lectured to, you were moving among the elements at your own pace. So there was video, and there was sound, various texts, images I had collected from his life, photographs. And it was in—it took place in several rooms, kind of like a maze.
Mossad assassinated him, the Israeli intelligence. there was a court case. It went to the court case in Italy, and it was proven. And their names are actually—which I don’t have off the top of my head right now—are available in the documents of that court case.
I do consider myself an activist, but I do also feel that when I’m working with my projects, many of them are very long-term and require a lot of research. And actually, it’s kind of the opposite of what journalism is about, because it’s about going really slow and taking your time, looking at tiny details that would not actually normally appear in news reports or news stories or all these—especially all these stories coming out the way the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine is contextualized in the media.
the tent. the memorial to 418 villages, yes, destroyed, depopulated and occupied by Israel in 1948.
I was in New York at the time, and I got a family-size refugee tent. It really was a community-based project which took place over a three-month period. And I stenciled the names of every village that was destroyed or depopulated or occupied in 1948 onto this tent, and then invited people to come sew with me, sew each name, embroider each name into this tent.
The villages’ names, I used Walid Khalidi’s book, All That Remains, which is—and we actually, when we would work on the tent, when someone would start sewing a new village, we would actually read in the book what he wrote about that village, who lived there before, how it was depopulated, etc. Walid is the cousin of the Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi.
And it became—it really became—it really became a social space where people came to gather and sew and work, but the other thing that was happening at that time when we were working on that piece was the Second Intifada had started. So, for many of the community, they were on Skype or trying to call family members. You would get on a subway train in the morning, and there would be these horrible headlines, and you just didn’t feel safe. So, even though we were sewing these names from what happened in ’48, we were also gathering in a space where we could be together to deal with what was happening in the contemporary moment. And that was really important.
I left space on the front, because I think the destruction of Palestine is a work in progress that’s still going on, so to imply that I would be adding more names later. So there’s one panel that’s completely empty.
“Ex libris” was made for dOCUMENTA(13). dOCUMENTA(13) is a big art exhibition that happens every five years in Kassel, in Germany, which is an incredible site because it’s in the region of Hesse, which is where the biggest book repatriation project in history ever took place, when it was under the American zone. And I was very fascinated by this idea of repatriation and restitution of property. So it made sense to me that my project would be about the books, which are currently in the Israeli National Library, that were looted from Palestinian homes and institutions in 1948.
first of all, those books are in the Jewish National Library in Hebrew University, and they have a mark, “AP.” That’s their catalog number, AP, which stands for “abandoned property.” So it’s really interesting because they’re part of the system, but they’re also—what happened to them is signified in this AP designation.
But they were looted. And I went to the library. They were taken from people’s homes and institutions and libraries. They were looted. They were stolen.
So I went, and I took photographs of the traces of the original owners, which I found in the books. So that’s what the installation is comprised of—notes, flowers, an inscription, somebody’s prayer card.
there was one that was a picture of Jesus, like a little bookmark, you know, these little—yeah. a picture of Jesus in an Arabic book.
I took some of these inscriptions, and I—because I wanted this idea of the public and a collective to be an important part of this. And you know when you write an inspection in a book, it’s so small, and it’s so personal. So I took a couple of them, and I turned them into large-scale murals so they would be out in public space. One of them is actually—I put, a few years later, up in New York, and I think it’s still up. You can see it from the High Line.
High Line is a painted mural on the wall above my gallery. it was “This book belongs to its owner, Fathallah Saad, and he bought it with his own money in March 1892,” I think it is.
he wrote it in the book, yeah. So I translated it into English, and then we have it in English and Arabic there on the High. It’s still there. I think it’s still there.
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Emily Jacir, Palestinian artist and filmmaker. She is a professor at the International Academy of Art, Palestine, in Ramallah. Her work includes a diverse range of media and strategies, including film, photography, social interventions, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. In 2007, she won the Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. In 2008, she won the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum.
— source democracynow.org