Assembly of Repair 2024

Installation: Moving image sculpture, Augmented reality, sound 2024

Assembly of Repair is a moving-image sculpture with immersive sound and augmented reality that considers repair as a “minor gesture”—a delicate, ongoing attunement to diasporic postmemory sedimented in more-than-human materials and carried forward through speculative, fabulated form. A constellation of field recordings mapping the soundscape of Illigh, a village in the Souss–Massa region of Morocco, is woven together with a recovered soundtrack from a 1950 French colonial ethnographic film shot in Illigh, documenting a small Amazigh-Jewish community displaced three years after filming. In the footage, hands perform everyday and spiritual labour—pounding wheat in wooden mortars and tending to daily tasks. These soundscapes are reassembled into a pulsing, rhythmic audiovisual composition. A pillar-like sculptural form—constructed from living materials including beeswax, natural resins, copper, and earth mineral pigments—contains, at eye level, a narrow embedded monitor looping a synthesized animation translated from the sound. The pillar echoes earthen ruin structures shaped by time: standing, witnessing, and being witnessed. An augmented reality layer, activated through mobile devices, extends the piece into the surrounding space. As viewers move, their proximity, posture, and distance modulate a responsive, haptic soundscape, making embodied navigation part of the work’s continuous process of repair.

Assembly of Repair

"The aesthetic links between people and land are explored by interdisciplinary artist researcher Nava Messas-Waxman. In her 2024 installation, Assembly of Repair, she sutures together sampled colonial documentary film, augmented reality (AR), and a sculptural pillar resembling the biblical figure of Lot’s wife. Through the intermingling of virtual and physical, lived experience and official histories, Nava troubles geopolitical borders; her identity as a Moroccan Jew elides firm boundaries as seen in the assemblage of physical, digital, and virtual cultural artefacts that construct a living diasporic archive that evades dominant narrations." -Dr. Marissa Largo

Exhibited at Tentacular Futures, Markham Campus Gallery, curated by Dr. Rebecca Caines & Dr. Marissa Largo