Nagham Abu Assaf's "What resides between the lines?" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on July 29th, 2023 as one of 19 AEROPONIC ACTS of WHERE THE MOON IS UP curated by Elisa Giuliani.

Here you will find the documentation of Nagham Abu Assaf's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Giulia Crispiani and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

What resides between the lines?

Nagham Abu Assaf's question: What resides between the lines?

Nagham's introduction:

Behind the text,

A paragraph, a mirror…

Sites of various reflections. 

A second writing, 

A (re)writing

The number is found reduced.

Memory calls for five but counts three. 

Found in images, found in words.

Behind the text, 

The omitted [verb] persists. 

A scattered mirror,

A rewritten paragraph

In a second language. 

(Not) found.

Giulia's report: A Three channel video on three overlapped layers—a transparent long fabric hangs in the middle of the stage on the left side, while two performers are sitting on one corner with a really dim light, giving their back to each other like a two headed figure. Their voices are mediated, delayed, going through a synthesizer—“protected by the darkness of the night”—an echoing voice is whispering (in arabi) and the first screen goes on with a recording of a text typing—“the song was chanted in the valley of green spring, an oasis located between two deserts”—it writes, deletes and rewrites. A second video goes on in the front and overlaps the first in the back, that goes on with writing. The video in the front is showing some thin paper making sound, and it’s texture resembles a mountain—“dense clouds and a storm.” There’s a soundscape like a bass white noise on the back, overlapping the noise of the paper. “The inhabitants move away in the nearby desert found some abandoned houses. Children”—then the voices start speaking—“the story begins with an encounter”—two voices are overlapping one is whispering, both are echoed—“found fatigue and asked why don’t we stay here to be answered ‘it is haunted by the desire to possess’”—delete and rewrites constantly—“an orchestrated spectacle, a machine pulling strings.” The second video now fits in the fabric and it’s a closet up of some texture looking like rocks, moving slowly on screen. The sound becomes more narrative and present. The image subtly gives some more details still not fully legible. A landscape. The border lines—“parallel lines from A to B, from border to border”—the image becomes illegible again, a texture, a close up, mountains? A map? Black and white worn out images, parallel lines—“when all goes quiet, protected by the vastness of the night..the softness of the dunes (…) to listen to the land, listen to the sand, in my story the woman surrenders listens to the clouds.”

Phanuel Antwi I have to think of the relationship between Narcissus and Echo, the mythology of Echo—in the experience of the work, the invocation of shadow and light, the lines were almost dots, then I began to perceive leaves and mountains—about the relation between Narcissus and Echo. Life lines, lines through the memory, life departing, and skin, of the mountain and of the leaf, how they become something else, then I was thinking about generation and reincarnation. Then the editing error—I wish I got the full sentence. If writing is a technology, what resides between the lines? Unfortunately I feel I missed something based on where I was sitting.

Ayesha Hameed The word that comes up to me is decipherability, as I’ve only seen parts of it. Then I realized that it wasn’t about absorbing the text—it was all in the level of indecipherability. I didn’t have to keep remembering, it’s not about a retention of knowledge. What you remember is the world she built not the story. Paper becomes landscape, text moves and moves us. The loss of the text reminded me of the desert and the shifting dunes, and the editing and erasure—it was about all these losses. There were things that stopped us from being able to remember. Stories were handed down through repetition and oral tradition, and we think how there’s something under erasure that gets transmitted. Or that nuclear waste in the US desert, how to say danger to the generations to come, in what language? Then Bruce Lee—be like water: I saw sound, moving with and accepting a kind of erasure as a fundamental resistance, undermining of the authority of the text all the time. Landscape is not about imposing a fixed meaning on that, as well as the master narrative is being limited, so it’s perception.

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi This was about cartography, through the lines and the work you were evoking specific topos (places), the use of this superposition of layers are wrap lines that are creating a sort of a broken homemade satellite. The body scale was adjusting to the geography in a topographic act. Your voice with all these layers created the map. Technically you did drawings without doing lines. The superposition created the lines—and this was your question.

I also had to move to experience the work—perhaps it would be interesting to rethink it as an installation. When I moved I got a clearer position, and a couple of things came to my mind: the relationship between page and landscape, how text can be a landscape somehow, you can build a geography. This idea of a culture’s disappearance, the clearing of a land, by imposing a word. Verba volant, scripta manent—this is the first age where this difference is minimal. By rewriting the same story over and over, you got me thinking about Queneau’s Exercises in Style. In your work on the understanding of the story, style is a political choice.

About Nagham Abu Assaf

Nagham Abu Assaf 's "What resides between the lines?" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on July 29th.

Find the overview of all nineteen AEROPONIC ACTS 2023 here: WHERE THE MOON IS UP

In italiano: 

TITOLO: Cosa si nasconde tra le righe?

DOMANDA: Cosa si nasconde tra le righe?

Dietro il testo,

Un paragrafo, uno specchio...

Siti di vari riflessi.

Una seconda scrittura,

una (ri)scrittura

Il numero si trova ridotto.

La memoria chiede cinque ma conta tre.

Trovato nelle immagini, trovato nelle parole.

Dietro il testo,

il [verbo] omesso persiste.

Uno specchio disperso,

Un paragrafo riscritto

In un secondo linguaggio.

(Non) trovato.