Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948
Today I was going through some old video footage and decided to upload some excerpts of us working on this piece...this is from 6 years ago...pre 9/11...it was an amazing time to be an Arab in New York then. Our community was really active and vibrant in intellectual, political and cultural spheres.
These are video excerpts from the making of "Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948"2001. This piece is a document (or the remains) of a 3 month community based project. Over 140 people came through my studio to sew and socialize, often there was live Arabic music. There were lawyers, bankers, filmmakers, dentists,consultants, playwrights, artists, human rights activists, teachers, etc. There were Palestinians (some of whom come from these villages), Israelis ( who grew up on the remains of these villages) and people from a multitude of countries. (I used the archive of Palestinian villages compiled by Walid Khalidi in "All That Remains". )
Today Jamal Rayyis and I did a live, improvisational performance of fragments from our on-going "Falafel Chronicles." We broadcasted live from the Staten Island Ferry which my friends Valerie and Angel have turned into a mobile radio station. Check out their project at:
http://www.fmferryexperiment.net/
There will be a podcast of our performance on their site soon.
I am currently exhibiting a new work at this year’s Venice Biennale. Robert Storr invited me to participate in his exhibition entitled Think with the senses – Feel with the mind. I am presenting Material for a film (2005 – ongoing). This installation in Venice is comprised of photographs, text, video and sound pieces and was devised in part with the support of La Biennale di Venezia. Here is a brief text I wrote, one installation shot, and some components from the piece.
Material for a film (2005 – ongoing)
Wael Zuaiter was the first victim in Europe in a series of assassinations committed by Israeli agents of Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats that was already underway in the Middle East. Zuaiter was gunned down with 12 bullets outside his apartment in Piazza Annibaliano, Rome on October 16th, 1972.
In 1979, Wael Zuaiter’s companion of eight years, Sydney born artist Janet Venn-Brown published For A Palestinian – A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter. One chapter, titled Material for a film by Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro, is comprised of a series of interviews conducted with the people who were part of Wael’s life in Italy, including Janet herself. They were going to make a film, but Elio Petri died shortly afterwards and the film was never realized. This chapter was the point of departure for my project.
I went back to Rome in 2005 to continue collecting material for a film.
I visited his friends in Rome, Massa Carrara and elsewhere and I made several trips to Nablus to visit his sister Naila and see his family home where he grew up. I visited Janet Venn-Brown in Rome regularly during these three years. We spent many weeks together, calling on Wael’s old friends and going through her extensive archives. I found a letter Janet had written to Costas Gavras asking him to consider making a film about Wael because she believed that through his story, the story of thousands of other Palestinians could be told.
Wael’s friends during his ten years in Rome included a myriad of cultural leaders, artists, journalists and poets, including Alberto Moravia (with whom he traveled twice to the Middle East with), Raphael Alberti, Antonio Gambini, Bruno Cagli, Jean Genet, Ennio Politi, Piero Della Seta, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Janet told me “He was a poet. He was completely lost without poetry.”
Wael Zuaiter in Peter Seller's "Pink Panther"
When Wael was living in Italy he used to sometimes be an extra in films in order to have some money. During my research I discovered that Wael Zuaiter had a role as a waiter when he was an extra in Peter Seller's film The Pink Panther, Rome, Cinecitta Studios, 1963. According to Janet he was so charismatic that the director picked him out of the crowd and offered him a speaking part but each time he got in front of the camera and they said; "Ready! Shoot!" he froze and forgot all his lines. After Janet described his role to me, I managed to find 3 glimpses of him in the film. Janet told me she was quite disappointed when the film came out, as she sat through it twice only to see that he was a quick flash across the screen.
15/9/2005, Piazza Annibaliano, Roma
15/9/2005 Piazza Annibaliano, Roma
Wael Zuaiter lived here in apartment #20 on the 7th floor. The 93 bus and the 80 bus come here. I am sitting outside across the street from his building eating lunch on Viale Eritrea, wondering which streets he walked down. Did he ever eat here? Where did he buy his paper and cigarettes?
He made a phone call at the Trieste Bar next door before going home as both his electricity and phone bills had been cut because he did not have enough money to pay his bills. Wael entered this doorway to go across the courtyard and enter Scala C, which was the entrance to his wing of the building (to the left).
Where were the Mossad agents hiding? It was around 10:30 p.m. when he headed to the stairwell of entrance C to take the elevator up to his flat. He made a phone call at the Trieste Bar next door before going home as both his electricity and phone bills
He reached the elevator. He was shot 12 times with a .22 calibre pistol with a silencer at close range.
After spending several hours inside his building examining his floor, the courtyard and elevator, I leave. As I am crossing the street to take one last picture of his side of the building I look down and see an old suitcase before me.
I was invited to show the piece I made for the Sydney Biennale at Palazzo delle Papesse. The show "System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" was co-curated by Papesse chief curator Lorenzo Fusi and New York/Dhaka based artist Naeem Mohaiemen. For more information and images of the show:www.papesse.orghttp://www.papesse.org/w2d3/v3/view/papesse/utf/mostre--36/index_en.html
On Monday October 16, 1972, Wael Zuaiter left Janet Venn-Brown’s apartment and headed to his apartment at no. 4 Piazza Annibaliano in Rome. He had been reading A Thousand and One Nights on Janet’s couch searching for references to use in an article he was planning to write that evening. He took two buses to get from Janet’s place to his in northern Rome. Just as he reached the elevator inside the entrance to the building of the apartment block where he lived, Israeli assassins fired 12 bullets into his head and chest with 22 caliber pistols at close range.
Wael Zuaiter had become the first victim in Europe in a series of assassinations committed by Israeli agents on Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats that was already underway in the Middle East.
Wael ended an article he wrote for the newspaper L’Espresso two or three weeks before his assassination by quoting the English mystic Francis Thompson:
"That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star"
Wael Zuaiter's dream was to translate A Thousand and One Nights directly from Arabic into Italian. He had been working on this project since his arrival in Italy in 1962. To this day an Italian translation from the Arabic does not exist, all the Italian translations are from other translations.
Wael had photocopied 4000 pages of one of the oldest Arabic editions from a library in Rome. He asked Laila Baido, a woman from Sardinia living in Rome, to help with the translation and they worked on it for many years. Janet and I searched for her last December, so I could see his xeroxes and their translations of the first book, but no one knew anything regarding her whereabouts.
The night Wael was killed he had volume 2 of the book in his pocket. Twelve of the bullets entered his body but there was a thirteenth bullet which pierced through the book and got lodged in its spine. Janet kept this book hidden for thirty years, recently she donated it to the Wael Zuaiter Center in Massa Carrara. On December 5th, 2005, I took a train to Massa Carrara to meet his old friends and to document the book. I photographed each page the bullet had gone through, until I could no longer see marks or imprints from the bullet.
I went into training at a shooting center in Sydney, Australia to learn how to use a gun. After my training, I shot 1000 blank white books with a 22 calibre pistol. The same gun the Israeli Mossad used to hunt and kill Palestinians in Europe.
