JÖKULSÁRLÓN 2014
video 6mn, 2018voice-over: Menha Batraoui, Mariam Saleh, Yara Goubran, George Azmy
“While contemplating the icebergs in Jökulsárlón “a site of glacier deterioration“ I saw a surreal scenery in which my memory entered on a journey” Nermine El Ansari
The video “Jökulsárlón 2014“ by Nermine El Ansari evokes powers of landscape and memory to transform each other and to question categories of time and space. The gaze cast on melting glaciers brings reminiscences which seems to signify geographical and chronological distance, but the body, regardless of its location, carries the memory. Act of remembering makes it immediately present. The echo of remote events comes with the repetitive chant of the ocean, the figure of connectivity. A continuous matter of water encompasses distant lands and carries waves from Mediterranean Sea to North Atlantic, back and beyond. The personal dimension of time and space is a mode of navigation, which cancel the separation between global regions informed by their respective histories. A sound of the sea might have been the same a thousand years ago or a thousand miles away.
Text by Hubert Gromny
Nature of Remembrance
Text by Daría Sól Andrews
Nermine El Ansari´s work “Jökulsárlon 2014” combines past projects into something new, repurposing materials and memories, overlapping recordings, and using her own personal memories to create an acted scene of memory through an image. From this piece, new soundscapes were reworked into a video from Jökulsárlón, a site of glacier deterioration. The two stories unpack families from different social layers, from different ladders and economic backgrounds. She addresses questions of displacement, identity, family, and language, in connection to the landscape. How do we approach things we have experienced in the past with new connections and connotations?
This is a story of history, how we narrate and remember history, that which was, between generations, and the narrating of personal stories: visualizing past stories, intimacy, and family relationships. Nermine conflates this onto a natural, Nordic, landscape, one which is quite far removed from the Arabic characters which speak over, resulting in a certain tension and disruption. The beauty of something which is being slowly destroyed, as we become a voyeur on these planes. Glaciers becoming water - nature is one, and so are we. Nermine presents a tension of history, imaging of family portraits and old photographs, slowly disappearing and being replaced by a black frame, erased from history. Like the melting of glaciers, which this narrative is conflated to, disappearing and melting into the water below. In the end, there will be no trace, as if they never existed. Our differences are so minuscule, and purposeless, they are arbitrary layers of difference that when we analyze them, they seem pointless. These dividers of identity we have socially constructed for ourselves are so arbitrarily based on non-reality, yet so ingrained in our understanding of being. Can we even begin to imagine a world where these were nonexistent? What would that look like?
