millenary witness
2024
Olive leaf extract, cotton fabric, sticker, ink
Beirut
Commissioned by Temporary Art Platform
This project aims to conjure an ancestral futurity in the present. As Lebanon undergoes perpetual crises, it leaves one’s life within it fixated on quotidian struggles, unable to imagine a brighter tomorrow, and occasionally escaping in the nostalgia of its recent romanticized past. Working with a seven-thousand-year-old olive tree, the work muses on the notion of deep time within the framework of this living tree, imagining the deep past as well as the deep future. This allows for a reconsideration of our identity within our current nation-statehood, to a more timeless one of a people’s relationship with land. With the war waged on our lands and that of our kin, it is vital to remember and envision a land that transgresses our contemporary national and sectarian divisions, to bring into our imagination a place-based identity that isn’t truncated but rather regionally fluid and interwoven. The work also uses the site of the billboard to consume light during its exhibition - just as a tree photosynthesizes - rather than promote consumption. The exposure to sunlight in the present alchemizes the ancestral tree’s leaves to postulate a renewed future.
The work is a three by four meter billboard that was up for two weeks. It is a large-scale anthotype. The images were a result of a ten person circle held by millenary olive trees in Bchaaleh, Lebanon. The images are printed on a transparent sticker material that is overlaid on cotton fabric coated with olive leaf extract. The extract then acts as a photosensitive substance that is exposed throughout the duration of its exhibition.
