In the Presence of Absence

The work takes inspiration from Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Absent Presence’ and Sinan Antoon’s lecture ‘Before the Ruins: When Mahmoud Darwish met with Walter Benjamin’ (5 November 2009).  In his lecture about Darwish’s poetry, Antoon speaks of the temptation ‘to speculate on the potential political implications of absence… Far from being negative, absence itself is the trace and the proof of what and who could have been and should have been there, not as remains, but as continuous uninterrupted presence.

The video performance explores this idea of absence and its subversive potential through a poetic and sensory reading of a beautiful stone in the outskirts of Ramallah hills. 

The work builds on research material collected during a residency with Sakiya, French Institute in Jerusalem and La Ferme du Buisson in Ein Qinya 2021.