Shared View (2022)

Shared View is a screendance film that explores intersectional considerations of home, belonging, place, space, and memory, as well as the experiences of forced and voluntary diasporic narratives in personal and family history. Developed over three years of crossing borders, the film is the culmination of auto-ethnographic research and employs performative methods of archiving. It delves into rituals and performative gestures of return across geographical borders between Morocco, Israel, and Canada, aiming to imagine an alternative cultural heritage based on a family history that was inaccessible due to the cultural erasure of the Arab-Jewish identity. The process involves performing, recording, and recollecting personal and cultural archives, with the intention of not only unearthing, questioning, and subverting existing archives, but also creating an imaginary living archive of gestures of belonging, in which memory and place are written beyond their evidentiary value.

The video has been constructed and re-choreographed into an immersive environment that reflects diasporic subjectivity and is a site of liminality. The installation comprises a three-channel video, sound, a mirror, wooden sculptures, a wall drawing, a photographic archive, and a rug. The duration of the film is 35 minutes on loop. The projection is structured in eight counterpoints, adopting a non-narrative approach, and reconstructed from multiple archival materials, including site-specific performance recordings, personal family archives, photographs, artifacts, photo albums, and various re-inscriptions of images and ephemera.

The installation was exhibited at HOME(LAND) Artworx Toronto in 2022, curated by Claudia Arana. This research-creation project was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Link to thr project site. Aditional text