Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
This work is composed of several works that come together to create a whole. The project can either be shown in its entirety or specific works from it can be shown as stand alone pieces. Specific details about these stand alone works can be shared on request.
The song is the call and the land is calling
The land is calling the vanished through the song
The land haunts us
And we haunt them
The shadow, the echo, the ghosts of what remain
Palestine, the colonisation of our land haunts us. Having been severed from the land we are haunted by it. A forbidden land like a forbidden love.
This is a work that explores various forms of hauntings, love stories bound to loss, land and self, forms of imprisonment and the call to get free, with sound and song being at the heart of this exploration. In it all is a search for a reconnection to a severed broken land, community, history, one that haunts,and calls us to resist the ongoing project of colonial obliteration.
The project is a mixed media installation with multiple channel sound and video. It formally explores the idea of hauntings in its aural and visual content and the way in which this material appears and disappears into a given space. Sometimes appearing as poetry from a dissonant voice, a broken melody or intense flashes of text and video, or an imprint from a forbidden land, a forbidden love.
This work is part of the wider project May Amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. May amnesia examines the place and significance of voice in the form of song and oral poetry and body in the form of dance and gesture as a political act of embodiment and becoming in a moment marked by various forms of colonial violence against entire living fabrics. The project repositions these moments as a material witness inscribed through body, movement, rhythm and voice to the destruction of everyday life that is occurring or has occurred. Equally it is also one of the most critical ways in which these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self and community once more. Often quite literally embodying and performing through their bodies and voice within and against these violences through renewed rituals of movement and song. At times splintering, even if momentarily, the various regimes of power that have rendered them uncounted, inaudible.