Touch over fear//some thoughts on roots and longing
THE BACKROOM
MUSEO TAMAYO + INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL
In these documents of process, Manal Abu-Shaheen layers her family’s journeys between the U.S. and Lebanon with her own, through family photographs, ephemera, and stories. She considers what it means to be at a distance from her close friends in Beirut as they recover and survive the events of the year, and she imagines how to photograph the interior space of such closeness, what that will mean for how she makes images in and of the city. Hellen Ascoli looks to knowledge embedded in the touch of thread, the weaver’s body, the words of weaving. Here, she challenges a Western hierarchy of language over touch, re-centering the function of the textile (to wrap, to warm, to touch, to soften, to take care) over the written word. In a series of short exercises, she translates the Kaqchikel Maya Keemik, Keetik, and Keexik through her body as she weaves, digs earth, and breaks branches: she wraps a root in a woven embrace. Thuy-Van Vu’s paintings often center objects separated from their context: paper lanterns, construction debris, a mosquito net. Intricately rendered, they have poetry in her delicate handling of modest materials, and in their subtle separation from worlds around them. Here, the artist shares photographs from a trip to Vietnam, considering craft traditions as they are separated from their place of origin. Alongside rice paper, a carved Buddha, and museum displays, she shows objects from home: a “Buddha’s hand” fruit, an engraved candy jar, a bamboo helicopter from a thrift store. She has an eye for the way we find ourselves in the lives of objects and landscapes. Together, these artists’ working processes are laden with information about materials and how they carry unspoken histories of value, care, and loss. They reflect on closeness and distance, and on the landscapes we remember, across generations.
Hellen Ascoli writes—about weaving and translation—"To let my body be the place where tension meets the ground," and I imagine a lightning rod connecting languages, pulling threads. She combs, she rakes, she draws an exhibition with neon tapes across her backyard, she stacks two tree limbs in an embrace. I spend my pandemic mornings in the sand of a barren yard in the Great Plains in isolation, and the grit powders my skin and gets into my teeth. We write each other letters. Manal Abu-Shaheen sends me a cyanotype she makes, of the ship that brought her great-grandfather to Ellis Island in 1907. She sends a photograph of the sun dunking into the sea beside Beirut. We talk about the failure of language to account for the distance between here and there, especially in these anguished weeks since the explosion. Her photographs of that city were already moving indoors, but now, isolating in New York, she imagines the intimacy of photographing her friends in their homes, indoors, together. The imagining is about closeness, about touch, about longing and what is no longer here, about having a coffee and telling the stories of this particular year. Thuy-Van Vu describes how her father would plant patches of green, plants and flowers, in the sun-bleached yard of his home in Phoenix, Arizona, and how they would always die under the summer sun there. We talk about things that couldn’t be said in words. “This is the idea of a house my father built,” writes poet Diana Khoi Nguyen. Plants now cover every surface of her Seattle office and home; she feels guilty for letting one of them expire for a painting. She sends photographs from a trip to Vietnam: modest sandals in a glass case at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City are marked with dirt from an artist’s day of work. A boy sands a carved Buddha, and the wood gradually changes tones. A typed list of “useful phrases for emergencies” in Vietnamese includes “Don’t shoot!” Photographs of a helicopter made of woven grasses and a broken wooden sculpture of a tank are local thrift store finds, imported from Vietnam.
Our talk turns to objects, their familiarity, how they describe the places they come from, the strangeness of her name engraved on a glass candy bowl. Paper shirts take the place of simple funeral rituals, a bowl of rice, a bowl of oranges for the dead, are now replaced by replicas of Gucci bags, dentures, gold watches. In my bedroom, one of Van’s paintings of construction debris—a torn-down house—has always been a reminder of the ephemeral, the transitoriness, of where we live. Things are torn down quickly in the cities where I love. Manal cites Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness,” and he writes, coffee “is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul.” What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee with these women gathered together in this dusty yard. “Sand describing sea,” writes Darwish, as he feels a phantom pain for an explosion he awaits, of the crushing rubble that he imagines will kill him. And then, he died in Houston, a place I have loved, of a heart surgery. Hellen and I read Kate Briggs’ This Little Art together as we think about translation, in language and in textile. “The erotics of proximity and distance” Briggs writes this phrase and I think erotics are about longing and loss, too, about closeness and its suspension.
I tell her I understand my distance from my communities through the tactility of the highway between here and there; in Texas, the highway is its own fetish. Keemik in Kaqchikel Maya is Tejer in Spanish is To Weave in English. “Keetik: Cortar ramas delgadas: Snap thin branches. Keexik: Picar tierra dura: To grind hard earth,” in Hellen’s translation. I buy a rake, a hoe, a pickaxe, a shovel, and the dirt continues to blow into my eyes, the grass is skeptical about its own survival; it is hard to grow something, alone, under this particular sun. Van’s photo of a fruit tree wrapped in netting gives me the envy of greenness, despite the tree’s stifling enclosure; the uprooted tree in another photograph feels like moving across borders, feels like the difficulty of finding my way home. The ship that brought Manal’s father to the U.S. was called the S.S. Independence, and her mother remembers the smell of orange blossoms in the air the year she moved to Lebanon. How do we put down roots in this year’s enforced stillness, I wonder, watching trash and dirt swirl in my wind-combed yard. Hellen wraps a tree root in woven textile, un abrazo for our roots, as we chip away at the rough dirt surrounding them. Touch over fear, she weaves.
Laura August
October 2020
El llano estacado, Tejas