جلبت شهرة معها فستان من الجزائر بلون زهري مونّس لأمها ريّا
جلبت شهرة معها تنورة من الجزائر بلون أخضر وأبيض، لدى حفيدتها ليلى
My 'Mother' didactically insists we should add diacritical marks to emphasize the richness of the masculine/feminine in language[s], while the artist, I, oppose to my mother's feminist gender-based pedagogy.
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Arabic diacritical are eight called Harakat. They are fatḥah, dhammah, kasrah, shaddah, sukuun. And tanwin is divided into 3 things tanwin fatḥah, tanwin kasrah, and tanwin dhammah.
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The Nightgown Pictures 'Every year on my mother Stina's birthday, my grandmother Nunni dressed her in a handmade nightgown and took her outside to be photographed. This tradition continued until the birthday when Stina could no longer fit into the nightgown.' – Image courtesy of Artist Nina Katchadourian
My 'Mother'; an Arabic teacher advocates to linguistically and grammatically normalize terms; pronunciations; accents that 'out' a woman's age.
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Arabic teacher Shuhra's early teaching in the 60s started as part of لجنات التعريب groups of teachers from all the Arab world went to Algeria to teach after winning its independence from France.
Based on birthday extremism of 'who was born first' aesthetic; asking the question: does more life just mean more suffering? How to celebrate an age of a body witnessed first and second Palestinian halaucost/nakba/catastrophe – you name it – this design for social change immersive 'birthday and cake' ritual consisted of listening, eating, reading, writing, singing and/or drawing for my mother's 79th birthday; a national day; of, decolonization.
Birthday Extremism: The Gap Between My Mother & “Israel” 1945-1948 creates tactile and temporal evidence of senses. Gaining skills to hone in our collective consciousness, the act of individual recognition as presence, being here and now may help us to acknowledge our intercorporeality.
I import educational dynamics to art and society through design and education. As group of readers, we roamed out for a Palestinian shat-ha of and about reading and rereading sociology of An Air-Smelling Event: The Metamorphosis of Simon the Just and His Shrine by Sociologist Salim Tamari, who was born in Jaffa, where my father was born, in the same year my mother and father were born, in 1945; three years elder than what so called; "Israel". We read it with a complex voice material + Unseen. We also went for a sarha aiming to 'colonize' for a new Palestine for my mother; The Seventh Sarha; a one-channel journey video based on Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape book; a series of six sarhat (the plural of sarha).
Through overlapping two different Palestinian Arabic terms; Shat-ha vs. Sarha شَطْحات وسَرْحات; terms reflect meanings around 'to go out', or 'to roam freely'. Through intercorporeal art education as political witnessing; decolonial LA LA LIL JIDAR pedagogy; and Birthday Extremism design; when an age is an act of resistance; a didactic form of decolonization, we place sites, names, barriers, and subject positions based on geopolitical conceptual design of 'author-reader' identity.
We recited Quran acknowledging a christian birth date, to didactically decentralize Israel; Shuhra's age celebrated by Birthday Extremism rituals of Chocolate Franklin Roosevelt Meeting Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud On Valentine's Day 1945 On An American Cruiser, Suez Canal Fudge Pineapple.