The Thread Between Us

Immersive installation, sound, video, fabric, 2025–ongoing
^{The Thread Between Us is an immersive installation developed from lullabies and laments gathered across different geographies. The voices come from Palestine, Italy, Ireland, Afghanistan, Greece, Congo, Ghana, and Russia. I approach these songs as forms of oral history, carried through care, loss, displacement, and memory.

Each recording was made as the song would be sung in private: to a child or to the dead. The voices are not performed for the work. They are recorded as offered, without direction or reinterpretation, preserving the intimacy through which these songs are ordinarily transmitted.

Together, the recordings form a growing oral archive within the installation. Rather than removing these songs from their intimate origins and fixing them into a formal record, the work preserves them through the act that has carried them across generations: listening. The archive remains living and unfinished, expanding as new voices enter it and allowing each song to retain the language, memory, and presence of the person who offered it.

Lullabies and laments exist beside one another in the installation. One accompanies arrival, care, and continuity; the other accompanies loss, disappearance, and death. Yet both emerge from intimate acts of holding. I am interested in this proximity between beginnings and endings, and in how the voice carries what cannot always be preserved through written or institutional forms of memory.

The installation is site-responsive and changes with each presentation. Sound, moving image, translucent fabric, speakers, and the spatial conditions of each site shape how the work is encountered. Rather than concealing its technical structure, the work leaves its materials exposed, allowing the architecture of listening to remain visible.

In earlier iterations, fragments of language related to home, shelter, safety, occupation, and statehood appeared throughout the space. These words considered the distance between institutional language and lived experience: how ideas of belonging and protection change when they move between political vocabulary and the bodies expected to live within it.

In later iterations, the moving image became a continuous observation of sheep filmed in the mountains. The decision emerged from personal reflection and lived ritual rather than from an attempt to construct a fixed symbol. Across Abrahamic traditions, sheep accompany moments of arrival and departure, birth and death, celebration and mourning. Their presence creates another cycle alongside the lullabies and laments: between being brought into the world and being mourned from it.

The sound work was developed with a subtle ambient layer by Andi Dhima. The project itself grew through conversations around sound and my reflections on Palestinian lullabies, where songs passed quietly within families can become forms of care, preservation, and transmission.

At its centre, The Thread Between Us is an act of listening. It asks what a voice can carry when bodies, homes, and histories are separated by geography, time, or displacement. Across languages and places, the songs do not collapse these experiences into one another. Instead, they are allowed to remain distinct while briefly occupying the same space.

The work does not seek closure. It holds presence.

Presented
Arte al Centro — Cittadellarte, Biella, Italy, 2025
UFFS — Samothraki, Greece, 2025
HELMCA Festival — Ioannina, Greece, 2025

Sound collaboration
Andi Dhima}

DALIA JACOBS