Beginnings are a delicate thing
🪬I have been working behind the scenes in my creative incubator on a familial history project that started in the summer of 2023. The distillation of the idea took place during a six week Emergent & Current Practices 2023 summer workshop facilitated by Caroline Bergvall.
As part of the project that I tentatively called "Lines of flight", I conducted a series of recorded interviews with my mother (Algerian) and my father (Croatian) in the summer of 2023, winter and summer of 2024, and summer 2025; I interviewed my mother and father separately about their experiences of Algeria before, during and after the war of Algerian Independence; my parents met in Algeria in 1962, and married in Yugoslavia a year later. They then returned to Algeria much later, between 2007 and 2011. This is also the time I visited Algeria after a very long absence.
Arabic, my "shadow" Language
🪬Arabic is a heritage language for me, yet it has taken me a long time to be courageous enough to dive into that language; I was intimidated by its complexity and difficulty. Arabic is still an enigma for me, a beautiful mystery. It lived in the shadow of my memories for a very long time. Yet, I feel very close to it in some ways.
Unusually, my entry into the language came through Arabic calligraphy. Between April and June 2024 during one of the private mentoring sessions with the poet, coach and artist Caroline Bergvall, I had 5 mentoring sessions with Caroline Bergvall; a creative task during one of the sessions led me later in the year to enrolling on a intensive Arabic calligraphy course “Introduction to the Methods, Materials & Practice of Islamic Calligraphy” with the artist-calligrapher Soraya Syed in September 2024. Reconnecting with Arabic script through calligraphy and handwriting was a breakthrough moment for me; it revived Arabic sounds and memories of this “shadow” language. The course introduced me to the traditional method of making and using my own qalam (reed calligraphy pen) and creating my own paper; it covered daily practice of calligraphy writing of the Arabic alphabet in the riq’a script, and the creation of a free-form composition (“mini mashq”) as well as a finished calligraphy piece. The breakthrough effect that my re-encounter with the Arabic language and the Islamic calligraphy had on my current writing practice is explained in a 12-minute video conversation with Caroline as part of her Practice Conversations series. (Short video and long video available on Youtube).
The birth of Alphabet
🪬During the initial period of research I started reading some of my mother's diaries in French. But I soon became lost as a began meandering on the multiple paths that my familial history and Algerian heritage were taking me on. The history was so rich, so dense, and I began to unearth truths that were hidden to me before. At times, the process was very painful, as I was unable to distantiate myself from the material I was studying, and progressively bringing to life. The weight of the heritage I was carrying on my shoulders soon became too heavy. I could not find my way into moving away from being a daughter to looking at the extraordinary material I was uncovering as an artist. Until it suddenly occurred to me one morning to try with something very small, with the alphabet letters. It felt safe to do so.
At the beginning of the writing process, I imagined Alphabet as a structured sequence of 28 poems in prose in English, French and Croatian on the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet. One letter, one poem, one page. However, over time it evolved into a hybrid, circular, complex piece; a long meditation with the different interspersed forms of 'fragments'.... it started becoming more and more a journey through memories (mine and those of others), languages, relationships to people and places/spaces, and an apprenticeship in writing - not just calligraphy, but new written creative forms which began coming into being. Writing Alphabet became a kind of a life-work, a journey of my coming to the letters of the Arabic alphabet (the preparation of the qalam, the act of forming letters with ink on paper), and the search for a radically new form of writing. Without knowing, I was recording the journey that was taking me progressively from the place of the daughter to the slow appropriation of my place as artist. I am ambivalent towards the use of the word "artist" here; it is laden with cliches, false expectations, ego... We are born as artists and our life is a blank canvas that we fill over time; isn't this another cliche?. As I am developing this new form of writing, I am inevitably drawn to recording my own process; writing becomes an experimental methods lab; a creative process that constantly fails, as it folds and unfolds into itself. Line(s) of flight...
🪬My re-discovery of the Arabic language through Arabic calligraphy has been an extraordinary experience so far. I integrate the Arabic sounds, scents, colours passed on to me by my Algerian grandmother in my childhood through language into my left hand, my handwriting; I connect the memories to the gestures and movements of the calligraphic letters. I am back in my Algerian garden, the scent of oranges, lemon trees, the white of jasmine and the magenta pink of buggainvillea fill the air. Earth, dark red, sky, blue. The irresistible call of the Sahara desert.
To unfold the line(s), recover the lost thread(s), to release the work.
Alphabet, a symphony
🪬When I close my eyes, I see Alphabet as a symphony of voice, calligraphy, sound and dance. Multilingual poetry in motion vibrating between text, image, score, and gesture.
Alphabet, a study of the Arabic letters and their synaesthetic qualities, and their role as transmitters of cultural memory. See the letter alif, the first letter giving proportion to all the other letters in a chosen Arabic script based on rhombic dot (nuqtas) measurements. Or, hear the letter mim in a “mímyat” (type of Arabic verse form based on repetition of the sound “mim”): moulding-moving-maternal-material sound of music. Imagine tha: breath-bird flutter lighter than feathering, frothing sounds of the haïk (Algerian veil of white colour).
Alphabet, a rhapsody of multilingual sounds, calligraphic hand gestures as rhythm, visual metaphor, intertwining musical, geometrical and sound patterns, dancing poetry flying off the page.
Alphabet, the creation of a calligraphy-poetry book, and a live performance/installation: a celebration of cultural memories, modes of artistic expression bringing beauty, excitement and joy.
To free up verses of a poem from the page, to capture the calligraphers’ hand lightly tracing in black ink the rounded letters of the Magrebi script on glossy surface with the qalam (reed pen), to create dance as free form composition; for example, the word “hurriya” (freedom in Arabic).
Les dunes de sable perdent-elles leur couleur dans la pluie?
🪬✨🪬
31 December 2024, Zagreb / 8 May 2025, London / 26 May 2026, London.
