Immersive installation, 2025
Exhibited at Arte al Centro, Cittadellarte (Italy); UFFS Film Festival, Samothraki (Greece); HELMCA Festival, Ioannina (Greece).
Also presented in group exhibitions.
The Thread Between Us is an immersive installation I developed from lullabies and laments gathered across different geographies. The voices come from Palestine, Italy, Ireland, Afghanistan, Greece, Congo, Ghana, and Russia. I work with these songs as forms of oral history, carried through care, loss, and displacement.
Each recording was made as the song would be sung in private—to a child or to the dead. None of the voices are performed for the work. They are recorded as offered, without direction or reinterpretation.
The installation is site-specific and has changed with each presentation. I adapt the sound, video, and spatial arrangement in response to the conditions of the site and the act of listening within it. Over five exhibitions, the work has reached a form that feels settled, while remaining open to future changes.
I use simple and exposed materials—speakers, screens, fabric, and structural elements—without attempting to hide their function. In earlier iterations, Arabic words related to home, shelter, safety, occupation, and statehood appeared within the space. These fragments reflect how language circulates around belonging and control, and how meaning shifts when lived experience is removed from institutional speech.
Lullabies and laments coexist in the installation. Lullabies accompany care and continuity; laments accompany loss, disappearance, and death. I am interested in how both forms carry memory across generations, and how sound holds what cannot be archived in other ways.
The sound work was edited with a subtle ambient layer by Andi Dhima. The project began through conversations around his recordings and my own reflections on Palestinian lullabies, which have often carried meaning quietly within families. In contexts of occupation, these songs have functioned as forms of care, preservation, and transmission.
In later iterations, I replaced the video component with recordings of sheep filmed in the mountains. This decision came from personal reflection and lived ritual rather than symbolism. In Abrahamic traditions, sheep are present at moments of birth and death. They mark arrival and departure through acts of offering. The footage is observational and unembellished, and it exists alongside the sound rather than illustrating it.
The Thread Between Us is a work about listening—about what remains when voices move across distance, time, and displacement. The installation does not seek closure. It holds presence.
Arte al Centro, Cittadellarte (Italy)
UFFS Film Festival, Samothraki (Greece)
HELMCA Festival, Ioannina (Greece)
