A Letter To You

I have never really walked away from Palestine

In the early 80’s, I can still remember watching images of Palestine on TV with an acute awareness of the reality there: Three Israeli soldiers beating someone, taking their time, they were alone on the hills, breaking the bones of a young Palestinian.

Another image, I was 5 or 6 years old, a program on the liberation of Birkenau Nazi extermination camp.

Deep inside, I know that one of the reasons I am on this lifelong journey of struggle against injustice is that I knew since a very young age that I would try to stand for a world where tyranny and dehumanization could not be repeated.

I spent two years in Palestine.

It has shaped me. I am still listening and seeing the echoes of the people there. The human connection, the poetry, the music, the food, in another beauty despite all the struggle.

It is in East Jerusalem that I started painting in 1999…

The last 18 months have really deflated and confused me a lot. Every day, crying and screaming from inside like drips of poison. Impunity. A killing machine skillfully orchestrated, without any remorse. The Gaza strip as a laboratory of mass destruction with bombs, new lethal weapons, snipers, drones, quadcopter, forced displacements, large scale atrocities against civilians, starvation, imprisonment, torture, bulldozers, ethnic cleansing. Today, 60,000 deaths, 70% of destructions, no more infrastructures, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, the entire Gaza Strip is wiped out. Horror. For some experts, the equivalent of the bombing of Hiroshima or Dresden. It has a name: genocide.

If you are not rain, my love

Be tree

Sated with fertility, be tree

If you are not tree, my love

Be stone…  

Mahmoud Darwich

You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood, your city has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are.

Deafening silence for the world.

I wish these artworks can become a journey for you as much as they represent mine.

I go back to my studio, I need that suspended time between the sky and the earth, the openness of the horizon, it is my way at times to enlarge such a contrived world defined by violence, injustice, closeness and supremacism. I have always left the human representation in my work and instead have used the founding elements of life such as water, skies, trees or flowers.

It was in Gaza in 1999 that I saw the sea as an escape and a prison. It made me start using forms of representation that are to me against the human experiences of limitations, borders, destruction, stigmatization… I create open images between oblivion and remembrance.

Most of these images withhold information, they are intended to make you stand still, to make you see and to become eventually the subject of the work.

I live in them and for them. It is not much. My way of telling their stories again. My eyes are open and theirs closed. That is the little I can do today.