Loading ...A Syrian Artist Remakes the Home He Cannot Visit
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
BY: VERA CAROTHERS
The architect and artist Mohamad Hafez strides through his studio and pauses to gaze out the window, hands in his pockets. The space brims with objects, and he lists them for the filmmaker Jimmy Goldblum: “My dried plants, my miniature furniture, Christmas ornaments, shells, paints, nails, stones.” From a wall of shelves teeming with appliances and trinkets he pulls down a small knob. “Here is a radio switch,” he says, “but what I see in it is an exploded engine.” What he sees in these objects, where others might see junk, is everything. He uses them to build worlds from his memory, re-creating and reimagining sites from the Syria of his boyhood years.
His most striking piece, “Hiraeth,” named for a word in Welsh that means homesickness for a home that you can’t return to (or one that never existed), is a five-foot-by-three-foot reconstruction of a Damascus façade. A cluster of doorways, Roman arches, and an intricately designed minaret hover precariously over a wall inscribed with a Quranic verse about impermanence: “Everything on Earth shall perish.” Swatches of crimson and beige cloth affixed to twine mimic laundry hung out to dry; a tiny heap of metal filings and a few stones make a neat bird’s nest. There are no human figures in the model, but the bustle of the historic center of Damascus, the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, is palpable.
Hafez made the work during a lonely season after he came to the U.S., in 2003, to study architecture. Soon after arriving, he realized that his passport was stamped single-entry only, meaning he couldn’t risk leaving the country for fear that he wouldn’t be let back in. The year before, George W. Bush had begun a discriminatory racial-profiling program known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (nseers), which targeted tens of thousands of Middle Easterners and South Asians from countries designated as security threats to the U.S. Hafez began to feel extremely homesick. One night, when he was alone in the studio, he found the photograph of an old Damascus façade on a candy wrapper and suddenly thought, “If you can’t get home, why don’t you make home?”
Goldblum’s film was funded by the former congressman Dick Gephardt, who, in the recent era of Trump’s Muslim ban and caps on refugee numbers, wanted to support projects featuring immigrants. Goldblum felt that it was important to tell a story about war and migration without relying on violence to elicit empathy. He used a snorkel lens, an old Hollywood apparatus handy for filming miniatures up close, at times placing the viewer inside Hafez’s models, where we might begin to imagine what life was like in Damascus in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Hafez was growing up. Much of that world has been lost in the country’s multisided civil war, which has been going on since 2011. Goldblum’s wife, a journalist and filmmaker from Pakistan, who reported from her home country, lives with complex P.T.S.D. and he credits her with influencing his documentary style. His goal was to create a film that his wife and immigrants who have fled violence or conflict could sit through without being re-traumatized. “I’m very proud that there’s not a single drop of blood in this film,” he said.
After the start of the Syrian civil war, Hafez’s focus turned outward, to the river of refugees pouring out of the country. “There was this fire inside me to start humanizing refugees and to tell their stories,” he says in the film. In one scene, he visits a refugee camp in Lebanon, and interviews a Syrian man about the home he left behind. Inspired by personal stories like these, Hafez made a series of dioramas inside of suitcases depicting household interiors damaged by war. When the news footage from his home country was full of explosions and rubble, he focussed on memorializing its everyday details. His work is a reminder of the nuance and complexity of refugee identity. As he says in the film, “We come from established lives.”
