1/ And yet my mask is powerful Part 1
2016
By Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Duration: 8:25 min.
Recommended by Kathy Zarur
How does this work investigate “hope?”
”And yet my mask is powerful Part I addresses a fraught issue in the Palestinian experience – the right for refugees to return to their ancestral villages after their displacement in 1948. The video depicts a group of Palestinians who do just that. Quietly, they traverse a lush summer landscape that grows up around the ruins of Ottoman era buildings. The returnees’ identities remain anonymous, their faces covered by 3D prints of Neolithic masks excavated in the West Bank. Both futurist and deeply engaged with the past, the video is an enactment of reclamation, even while melancholic scenes suggest irresolvable pain.” —Kathy Zarur
About the work:
Neolithic masks taken from the West Bank and surrounding areas, and stored in private collections are hacked and 3D-printed. The oldest known masks, dating 9,000 years, mutate from dead fossil to living matter. Copies circulate in Palestine, eerily akin to a black ski mask. A group of youth wear them at the site of a destroyed Palestinian village. Becoming other, becoming anonymous, in this accidental moment of ritual and myth. Initiating a series of trips to possess and almost be possessed by these strangely living sites of erasure and wreckage. And yet my mask is powerful confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment. Taking Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the wreck’ as the beginnings of a script, And yet my mask is powerful asks what happens to people/ place/ things/ materials when a living fabric is destroyed. The project uses the trips taken by young Palestinians to the sites of their destroyed villages inside Israel, as an avatar for re-thinking the site of the wreckage. In these returns the site of wreckage becomes the very material from which to trace the faint contours of another possible time.
