Rehearsing the Future
Nadia Refaei, Alex Last and Jon SmeathersCurated by Sofie Burgoyne
Contemporary Art Tasmania
August 2021
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Instigated by Nadia Refaei, One day we’ll eat together involved a series of private rehearsals with her family members of the Syrian diaspora. Family members located in nipaluna attended the gallery in person with Nadia while family who live abroad, attended online. From the outset, the rehearsals were marked publicly as being private, closing themselves and the gallery off to regular visitors, to make space for a rehearsal of family.
How can a family spread across many continents meaningfully gather in the digital realm when they cannot gather in person? Names painted on the gallery walls in black paint and in different handwriting accumulated from week to week; they marked an accumulation of authors and participants of the rehearsals. The spelling of Nadia’s surname Refaei was at times spelt differently, revealing a name and a family in motion across continents and languages.
Upon speaking with Nadia, it would seem that in these rehearsals, only witnessed by Nadia and her family, that memory and projection of the future merged. The family conjured up memories of eating together in the past, whilst simultaneously preparing for the next meal together, one day, when they can.
One day we’ll eat together was particularly poignant in August 2021. Australia’s international borders were closed and Tasmania’s state border was also virtually closed. Western armies left Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation, leading to a series of images internationally broadcasted of Afghan families trying to flee, leaving behind country, culture and family. Whilst Syrians have had the reality of displacement, restricted travel and tenuous borders for many generations, and so too Afghans, Tasmanians (a population of far less recent immigrants than other states in Australia and a recent history of unrestricted travel), seemed to hold an empathy to the experience of Nadia’s family that might not have been there prior.
— Sofie Burgoyne, catalogue excerpt
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το ωρεα μας κηπο (our beautiful garden), 2022, digital print
untitled (installation view), 2022, digital print
(L-R) letter from Damman to Nipaluna and Yiaya and Pappou (installation view), 2022, digital prints
(L-R) Papou, Preparing the greenhouse for spring and untitled (installation view), 2022, digital prints
One day we’ll eat together was, and is, an exploration of our historical, familial relationship with migration and displacement as a family within the Syrian diaspora. Over a month-long period, a series of physical, symbolic and virtual meetings were prepared for and enacted between our family, now spread across continents. We met, made together, held conversations, and shared ideas / questions / thoughts / memories / photos / stories / recipes / hopes / worries across virtual and physical sites.
These meetings were reserved only for us, the CAT gallery becoming a place of private gathering. In addition to the physical site, already established online spaces on snapchat, whatsapp, facetime and instagram were also sites of gathering. I started the month thinking that we’d meet at the same time every week, but quickly let go of this idea. Instead the times and durations of assemblage shifted organically, moving beyond any structures I’d tried to create and responsive to everyone’s needs, wants and time zones.
During these meetings we moulded plates out of clay, which would later make up a sufra سفرة . A sufra is “a cloth or a table for the serving of food, or in an extended sense, a kind of meal”. For us food and tea is something almost always shared, rarely partaken in alone. The sufra is grounding, a place of sharing, gathering and discussion that is returned to throughout the day. Few places embody these interactions more. (Other places that come to mind are the mosque, the coffeehouse and the bathhouse – but none are more a feature of daily life and
entwined with family as the sufra).
The list of names (of authors) on the wall grew a little more every week. Those who could join in person did so, visiting the gallery to mould clay with me. Most joined online, their presence in the clay and contribution to the space nonmaterial and intangible, but no less there.
The plates are a rehearsal across time. They act as a record of our gatherings over the month, and an ongoing reminder of our ties to each other, their existence a promise that we’ll gather again one day and share another meal. A preparation for the next meal, a rehearsal of family. They are waiting objects and we are waiting bodies.
Some of the clay we used was collected from the soil in my parents’ garden. Later the plates were fired in their outdoor brick oven, most cracking and shattering but some surviving the crude firing. In Islamic narratives, the garden is a site strongly linked with poetic gesture.
I found that talking in this way, with something to do and focus on (whether in the gallery or garden) was more comfortable because it gave us something to collaborate over. I’m aware of my role as artist and instigator, and how this can affect a dynamic of working, sometimes making a process feel extractive. Our mutual inexperience with clay as material helped, adding to a sense of levelling.
The de-prioritization of an exhibition removed the expectation of outcome, giving way for opportunity to rehearse material together, explore and be playful – trying different ways to interact with the material and each other. Some plates were pit fired by me and baba in the garden, some were fired in a kiln by a friend. Some were a mix of found and bought clay, and some contained added grog made from the plates that had shattered. The resulting objects hold traces of these trials and handlings, and of place, conversation and community. They are permanently marked by the smoke and ash of each fire we built, impurities in the soil that were too small to sieve out, imprints of our skin. They remain unglazed and thereforeporous, continuing to soak in, take on, record.
This repurposing of the space beyond established structures asks how the gallery can be reimagined to serve different needs and communities. How can institutions make space for marginalised communities previously left out (intentionally or unintentionally) — allowing them to take up space and engage on their own terms?
Achille Mbembe (a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist) talks about the “democratisation of access” and its inseparability from the decolonisation of public
spaces. He speaks about this democratisation not as assimilation to structures already in place, but as a sense of ownership over public space brought about by a “rearrangement of spatial relations” — a creation of the conditions that allow people to feel that sense of ownership, or right to belong.
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In making work together and for each other, can the boundaries of artmaking expand beyond Western and colonial economies and hierarchies of value? Can we find opportunity in the gallery’s state as a public ruin, reimagining its place in, and relationship with, ourselves and our communities?
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Something else worth pointing to are the meetings and gatherings that happened on the periphery of this work, both planned and unplanned, and the important place they’ve held within this process. Meetings across gallery, garden and in virtual space with curator Sofie Burgoyne and fellow artists Alex
Last and Jon Smeathers (and the friends who joined in sometimes). Accidental or sought out exchanges of advice with neighbours and peers. A conversation across continents with Muhab from Om Sleiman farm in Bil’in, Palestine.
Last year I spent a lot of time cooking. nipaluna (where I live) only went through one short lockdown, but even so time slowed and opened for new or forgotten things. Lockdown also coincided with Ramadan, already a time for more thinking about and labouring over food.
I asked my cousin Sarah for her kabsah recipe over whatsapp. She had come to visit us in nipaluna the year before, having to make the trip without her ten year old daughter who wasn’t granted a tourist visa to enter the country because her only passport at the time was a Syrian one.
While Sarah was with us in nipaluna, she made us chicken kabsah. I spent last year learning how to make it, perfecting it, so I could keep bridging the distance between this place and that place — where we gathered around the sufra every Thursday or Friday afternoon, all thirty or so of us on someone’s living room floor, to eat together.
— Nadia Refaei, catalogue excerpt