| art.description.project | In the summer of 2014, poets Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren and Jenny Tunedal were working together in a translation workshop via Skype that had been ongoing for more than a year. When war broke out in Gaza, where El-Sousi lives and works, this translation workshop transformed into a daily conversation on war, despair, food, rooms, objects, women, children, mothers, intimacy, fear, news, weather and writing.
The differences and distances always present in translation work became enhanced and acute, as did a sense of closeness. The circumstances of war cut into our work and somehow into the everyday quotidian life of Sweden; as a shock, as a difference, as an acute experience of a lack of experience. The computer screen became, in El-Sousi’s words: “a blue window of hope”; the hope of continuing, linearity, future.
Continuity is complicated for anyone living in Gaza. Life is a secluded incarceration, not only in space but maybe even more so in time. Future as well as political and personal history are constantly being cut off from and/or conditioned by a claustrophobic present. The disaster that war is adds enormous pressure and fear to this present, to the extent that chronological time seems almost entirely dissolved. | sv |
