Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
–Federico García Lorca
This series of films departs from a conversation on landscape in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Mahmoud Darwish. It posits landscape as a place of connection as well as a reflection on memory, distance, and exile. The figure of the olive tree connects a wide Mediterranean region through millennia of parallel agricultural ritual and ecological coexistence. The olive branch is known as a symbol of peace while residing in a region that has been cut apart and divided.
Trees are a living archive of the land. Olive trees can live up to thousands of years, making them a stable and familiar element for generations of their neighbours. The olive branch is a symbol of peace whose stable grip has been wrested from the soil. They are also targets in the ongoing catastrophe in Palestine that is impossible not to speak of.
***
“A prisoner can feel more comfortable in a cell with lavish iron bars than in what appears to be a normal room.”
This phrase introduces the film Comfortable in our New Homes as a treatise on the indescribable condition of survivor’s guilt and the psychological burden of distance from a tormented homeland. Paradisiacal landscapes haunt the exile who wanders through a world that appears intact after catastrophe, as if the destruction of the world had no effect on landscapes belonging to the same planet. Basma al-Sharif’s multi-screen film is a visual essay on the fractured identities of the displaced – it pans over the ruins of the artist’s native Gaza after the last large-scale Israeli offensive against the besieged enclave in 2014. Beachfront properties surrounded by tree-lined boulevards give way to grey piles of rubble, an uncanny premonition of the unceasing production of images of destruction and genocide.
Pristine desert landscapes and quaint American homes appear in a triptych next to other environments that give an unwanted welcoming. It asks why certain landscapes are preserved while others are subjected to programmed erasure and violence. The film constructs a shattered psychogeography that delves between image, language, and landscape in scenes that move forward and in reverse until a final collapse of geography and time.The exile carries traces of her past into a ceaseless, ungraspable horizon.
Basma al-Sharif received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024.
Al-Sharif’s Major exhibitions include the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Mondays at MOMA, CCA Glasgow, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have been screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.
Àngels Miralda (1990) is an independent writer and curator. Her recent exhibitions have taken place at Something Else III (Cairo Biennale); Garage Art Space (Nicosia); Radius CCA (Delft), P////AKT (Amsterdam), Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), De Appel (Amsterdam), Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic (Municipal Gallery of Zagreb), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile (Santiago), Museu de Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira – Azores), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga). Miralda wrote for Artforum from 2019-2023 and regularly publishes with Terremoto (Mexico City), A*Desk (Barcelona), Arts of the Working Class (Berlin), and is editor-in-chief of Collecteurs (New York).
