THE TWIN SISTERS ARE ‘ABOUT TO’ SWAP HOUSES
2 video projection, photography, pamphlets Beirut, 2010–12
This multimedia installation followed the lives of twin sisters living in adjacent neighbourhoods in Beirut to negotiate the borders of displacement. The sisters’ husbands were employed by rival political parties, but were both living in the ‘wrong’ areas – areas outside their party control. The sisters decided to swap houses to align the political affiliation of their husbands with the political affiliation of the area in which they lived. However, the plan was continually postponed but always ‘about to happen’ due to the ever-changing political situation.
Hafeda worked with the sisters and their husbands to investigate the proximity of the swapping plan and its temporal dimension, asking each sister to draw a map of the route from her residence to her sister’s, and to track this route on the city skyline from her high window using a video camera. The video installation that was produced from this footage proposed the bordering practice of ‘matching’ lines of displacement between the twin sisters. It involved finding spatial moments of ‘twinning’ while they narrated a journey drawn on a map and tracked it on the city skyline across a visual horizon. If compared to the visibility of forced displacement of refugees, for example, the movement of the twins’ self-displacement is invisible at an urban scale. The narrative of the installation mobilized and visualized the sisters’ invisible self-displacement in a continuous time of ‘about to’. This was part of Negotiating Conflict series.
Exhibited at ‘Cities Methodologies 2012’, Slade Research Centre, University College London (UCL), London
Supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and UCL Graduate School