What is at stake is small attemtps of stories written and typed, balancing between personal, family and historical facts, and that “abstractly” and most probably absurdly re-investigate the political upheavals in the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Union with Syria, while I am trying to re-tell what I heard from family members, most of the times contradictory stories of the same traumatic event, trasnformed into short fictions. 

After investigating historical documents, archives, and notes left in the diaries of my Syrian grandmother, I thus scribble short stories whereby we read about the Union between Egypt and Syria, -rather experienced as an occupation by my aunts, that pushed those families for regional exile, at times when the “nation states” were born fresh following the loss of the Ottoman Empire. These attempts of Nasser lead to a revolution in Lebanon in 1958, and the killings and marginalizing of certain political sides opposing Nasser and his “pan-Arab” unclear plans, including some of my paternal family members. There were assasinations, leading for internal displacement inside Lebanon, and to surprising consequences of unexpected acts.

In this video, each chapter is introduced by a written and hand-sketched sentence that seperates each chapter and that reads:  “This video could have started like this”, to introduce a new rolling fragment filmed between 2003 and 2016 with a number of relevant family member each time, from my Syrian maternal side as well as from my Lebanese paternal side, including my Syrian grandmother who passed-away in her nineties, myself 20 years ago, my ten years’ younger sister, my matrenal aunts, and other changing protagonists. 

While some parts include bodily performative and theatrical movements, another part cuts into an ironical animation, and in the last minutes of the video, a toarch lightens faces in a painting, in an attempt to think further on images’ circulations in the digital realm, drawing and colouring vis-a`vis black and white family photographs, people “inhabiting” the pictures, and finally photos that want to be independant from the people they represent. 

This video piece was shown at early stages of edits and as part of an installaiton at the Giardinis of the Venice Biennale in 2015 – curated by Okwui Enwezor.