J’écoutais les cygnes.
Les cygnes dans la pluie. J’écoutais.
J’ai entendu des paroles vrai
ou pas vrai
impossible a dire.
I heard the swans
in the rain I heard
I listened to the spoken true
or not true
not possible to say. (1)
Beginnings are a delicate thing
🪬I have been working behind the scenes in my creative incubator on a familial history project tentatively called "Lines of flight" since the summer of 2023. The distillation of the idea took place during a six week "Emergent & Current Practices" summer workshop facilitated by the poet, coach and artist Caroline Bergvall. 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 Zagreb (in then Yugoslavia) shortly after. They returned to Algeria much later, between 2007 and 2011. Before one of my sessions with my mother, she mentioned to me her diaries (in French); she said she had about 30 written diaries. Toute une vie...
Arabic, my "shadow" Language
🪬Arabic is a heritage language for me, yet it has taken me a long time to be brave enough to dive into that language. Arabic has been living in the shadow of my memories for a very long time. Unexpectedly, I entered its space through Arabic calligraphy.
Between April and June 2024 I took private mentoring sessions with Caroline; a creative task during one of the sessions led me to enrolling on a intensive introductory course on the methods, materials & practice of islamic calligraphy with the artist-calligrapher Soraya Syed. Reconnecting with the Arabic script through calligraphy and handwriting was a breakthrough moment for me. The transformative effect that my encounter with Arabic calligraphy had on my writing practice is discussed in an intimate conversation with Caroline as part of her Practice Conversations series.(2)
The bringing to life of my shadow language through Arabic calligraphy is an experience that continues; I undertook a course in January this year on the art and practice of the Maghrebi script (3). When I take my qalam, I revive the Arabic sounds, scents, colours of my Algerian childhood summers. The Arabic language that my grandmother spoke to me when I was little resides in my left hand; my writing hand has become a receptacle of memories, a generational transmission tool. It connects my memories to the lines, gestures and movements of the calligraphic letters. I am transported to the Algerian garden of my grandmother with perfumes of oranges, lemon trees, and splashes of white and magenta, jasmine and buggainvillea.
The birth of Alphabet
🪬During my initial period of research I began reading some of my mother's diaries. They were fascinating but I soon became lost in my own meanderings and circular paths of my familial history and Algerian heritage. I began unearthing truths that were hidden to me previously. At times, this process was very painful and other times, it was celebratory and joyful; yet, I felt unable to distantiate myself from the material I was studying. The weight of the heritage I was carrying became too heavy. Until it occurred to me to try and start with something very small, the alphabet letters.
Originally, I imagined Alphabet as a 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, with time it evolved into a hybrid, complex, experimental composition; a long meditation in which poems in prose and verse are interspersed with the different forms of 'fragments'.... 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 came into being. Gradually my writing became a life-work, a voyage 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 realising it, I started rewriting my own writing position; the process of moving away from the place of the daughter to the fragile appropriation of my place as artist started slowly to take shape. Since I began developing this new form of writing, I am drawn more and more towards making the recording of my process the primary object of writing; an experimental methods lab; a creative act that inevitably fails, as it unfolds and folds into itself.
Alphabet, a multilingual symphony
🪬When I close my eyes, I see the future of Alphabet as a symphony of voice, calligraphy, sound and dance. Multilingual poetry in motion vibrating between text, image, score, and gesture.
Alphabet as 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).
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, to create dance as free form composition; for example, the word “hurriya”, freedom in Arabic, and also the name of my grandmother.
To unfold the line(s), recover the lost thread(s), release the work
do sand dunes
lose their colour,
do they call the desert
to themselves in the rain?
🪬✨🪬
31 December 2024, Zagreb / 8 May 2025, London / 26 May 2026, London.
Notes
(1) Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, Oakland: University of California Press, 2022 (first published in 1982).
(2) Short video and long video available on Youtube.
(3) Maghrebi scripts developed from Kufic letters in the Maghreb (North Africa) and al-Andalus (Iberia).
