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Yayo Aznar Spanish critic

 

To know the truth of who they were, we need to hear them, and not those who have judged them, not those who have tortured them, for “they” cannot be, at least for us.

 

Tayseer Barakat’s art work contains 48 boxes, a number associated with an absolute risk. The year 1948 was important for the Middle East: on May 14th Israel’s independence was announced, and the HAGANA, a Zionist armed group, which had perpetrated a series of dangerous attacks, was to become the official army of the new state. As the entire world knows, Israel’s formation was through expropriation and settlement of land owned by Arabs, and thousands of families were forced to evacuate their homes in what was later referred to as Al-Nakba; a collective expulsion and the Arab world filling with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, prevented from returning.


Since that time, things have not improved much, and all attempts to peace in the region (always shaky attempts) were frozen. Simultaneously, Israel maintains an organized and illegal occupation. Many of those which stand in its way are put in prison. This work talks about prisons and jails. In the forty eight boxes, we find the burnt wooden silhouettes (faceless, nameless) attached with letters of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Letters with parts that could be read. Surely, they are letters that speak of their daily lives, their worries, asking how are you and what are you doing, enquiring about their children, and women…, letters such as those that could be written by anyone who is away from home and family. Yet these are letters which are confined with them, and the replies, if they arrive, would be read over and over again until they wither, because there in the prison, these silhouettes which bear no name or face, do not allow themselves to forget who they are. Contrary to the official chronicles in the records of prisoners, which Foucault enjoyed investigating; they never rendered anything new about the person, but kept them, as Pardo says, “anonymous”. These letters tell of prisoners and due to them, each one of these silhouettes has a name that will remain in the memory, even if they were written of again (once and a thousand times), the big story.

 

The materials used by Barakat in this work reflect the intention and the content. First the glass: fragile, transparent, well-closed, like the circumstances of daily life and its reasons. After that comes the wood, with shadows and symbols drawn with fire, taking us back to the tree, which carries the most symbolic meaning for Palestinians; the olive tree, the tree is synonymous to every Palestinian, because it is rooted to the ground and in life. Lastly comes the paper in a form of a letter defines the connection between the individual and the group, between the prisoner and his family, between isolation and freedom. Letters weave the collective consciousness towards the unjust pressure and the urge to resistance and recovery. Letters written in solitude to be read in utter solitude, despite the fact it seems free and open, exposing everything. Some of them are folded, others are rolled up and others form arches, so that the group attains a diverse individual configurations, allowing each prison cell, regardless whether they are all the same, to seem different with all its details, such as is the difference between the subject and the group.

Luis Ortiga
Tonia Raquejo