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هنا وهناك - روما
Here and There - Rome Edition
Performance / Installation - 2017
Performer: Sara El Debuçh
Various cotton and polyester fabrics
by Roy Dib
Produced by MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts
and presented as part of the exhibition 'Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbours' (November 2017 - May 2018)
Photo credit: Luis do Rosario Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI
Performer: Sara El Debuçh
Various cotton and polyester fabrics
by Roy Dib
Produced by MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts
and presented as part of the exhibition 'Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbours' (November 2017 - May 2018)
Photo credit: Luis do Rosario Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI
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In 2013 people in Aleppo starting taking down the curtains from their balconies, sewing them together and raising them in the streets between neighboring buildings to protect themselves from snipers on the other side of the city. We will not know how they felt. This is a performance.
Here and There extends Dib’s narrative engagement with spatial demarcation and political reality through consideration of material and form. Five rolls of fabric hang in the MAXXI atrium, creating a segmented curtain-like structure partially concealing a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ that exists because of them. Sara sits at the base of one of these rolls, cutting small rectangles of fabric to make talismans for the audience, chipping the invented boundary between here and there, bit by bit, and transforming it into another boundary, a Hijab (Arabic for Talisman that actually means Concealer), between its wearer and evil. After she leaves, the audience is confronted with a deteriorated boundary, devising a more permissible route between a fictional ‘here’ and ‘there’. Throughout this performative installation, these fabrics are in continuous transformation, from textile to curtain to shield. To the audience, they obscure the other, but more so, the self in relation to the other. They transform from generic to particular, and from mass to intimate. While set up as a mode of intentional alienation, they become the medium by which a stranger (Sara) offers a promise of safety. With its intersecting and temporal layers, Here and There mocks safety in an already safe space, and highlights the fact that materials don't only do what they are born to do. One usually does not need a shield in a museum, but materials of this performative shield find their way out of it and manifest on selected necks of its visitors, as talismans that adopt the bodies of their wearers as ‘here’ – bodies that transform from their audience to their reasons to be. Text by Raafat Majzoub 
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