If t ruth be t o ld
Whether they’re fleeing from persecution in their homelands, saw their lives disrupted by armed conflicts, or were the victims of natural disasters, refugees have stories to tell that most of us can barely imagine. And they are not always easy to listen to. Sometimes, it’s easier just to tune them out. And, sometimes, our own prejudices get in the way of really hearing and seeing them.
When Berlin- based artist Candice Breitz, who specializes in moving-image- based installations, interviewed Somalian refugee Farah Abdi Mohamed for her 7-channel video project, Love Story (2016), the atheist was seeking asylum in Germany and fearing for his life from Berlin’s conservative, religious Somali community. He told the story of how he arrived, f leeing first from a devout Muslim community in Somalia to Egypt. But he found that in Cairo, too, the pressure to conform to the dictates of religious doctrine was stif ling. After a 17- day incarceration for attempting to f lee the Arab city, he managed to pay smugglers to get him on a fishing boat bound for German shores, with more than 300 other refugees on board but little food and water. Would his story carry less weight if you were to hear it from a face or voice you recognized? Would it carry more? Would you be satisfied with just a facet of the whole story?
“Love Story offers those who spend time with the work two very different ways of relating to a set of narratives, which I consider to be both urgent and immensely reflective of the times that we live in,” says the 48-year-old Breitz. “It is a machine of sorts, in which one is asked to consider how one allocates one’s attention.”
Mohamed is one of six people interviewed for the project. The others are Sarah Ezzat Mardini from war-torn Syria; José Maria João, a former child soldier from Angola; Shabeena Francis Saveri, an Indian transgender activist; Luis Ernesto Nava Molero, a Venezuelan political dissident; and Mamy Maloba Langa from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Oppressive conditions forced all to f lee their respective countries.
Love Story tells their personal narratives twice. In one of two adjacent gallery spaces at SITE Santa Fe, a video installation shows excerpts of the interviews as performed by actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. They’re filmed in front of a green screen and edited into a fast-paced montage that shifts back and forth from one actor to the other. In this way, the original narratives become fragmented, stripped of depth and nuance, and devoid of context. The identities of Breitz’s original subjects, too, are lost as the actors take on their identities and their stories.
This initial stage reflects the piecemeal and controlled ways in which information comes to us in the digital age. “Rather than seeking to draw easy conclusions, the installation invites viewers to reflect on how stories are packaged and on how our ability to respond empathetically — or not — is affected by the source and packaging of a particular story,” Breitz says.
In the second part of the installation, viewers encounter six suspended screens where the fulllength interviews (the shortest is nearly three hours) play out, offering the chance to hear the personal narratives directly. Staff members are on hand to start and stop the videos for solo viewers.
Love Story underscores the time and attention we give to true stories once they’ve been transformed into popular entertainment or edited down into
cautious narratives. Some might be more invested, for instance, in seeing Liam Neeson in an action f lick like Taken (2008) than in understanding the scope and complexity of human trafficking — the real-life issue that inspired the film and its sequels. Intentionally or not, the media provides safe, digestible ways for us to approach difficult subjects. Baldwin and Moore’s video reveals little about the real people whose narratives they reenact; instead, it provides only fragments of the refugees’ experiences.
“Maybe it’s good that everyone will hear the story and say thank God for everything they have because maybe right now some people are warm in their homes,” says Moore, channeling Ezzat Mardini. “But the Syrian people and the Iraqi people and people from Afghanistan — all these refugees — are cold in the street.” The significance of the statement is lessened by the sudden appearance of a smiling Baldwin, channeling a starstruck refugee who’s just been told that the actor will be reciting his interview. Such juxtapositions of unrelated sound bites create a kind of dissonance, reinforced by the fact that these actors are wealthy and White.
Ezzat Mardini’s journey from Syria to Europe was a perilous one. Born in Damascus in 1995, she trained from a young age to be a professional swimmer. The violence of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011 and is still raging, forced Ezzat Mardini and her younger sister Yusra to leave the country in 2015. They didn’t have the option of waiting six or seven years for visas, so they f led illegally. In her recorded interview, she gives a vivid, detailed account of the circuitous route they took to reach safety in a foreign land. They paid smugglers exorbitant fees to get them across the Aegean Sea from Izra, Turkey, to the shores of Greece. Twenty people were crammed in a rubber dinghy built for eight. When darkness fell, the wind swelled, blowing the boat off course. Then it began to fill with water, threatening to go under. “The voice of 20 person [sic] become [sic] one voice,” she says in accented English, “and everyone was saying, ‘Oh God, help us.’ ” She jumped into the dark waters and was joined soon after by her sister and some others. She began to guide the boat by hand, reaching the far shore after several hours of strenuous swimming. She’s been credited with saving the lives of everyone on board.
To reach such stories takes time (Ezzat Mardini’s account of the boat crossing comes well over an hour into her interview). It takes a willingness to listen and to look past skin color and an imperfect grasp of English. It takes a willingness to let people tell their stories in their own voices. But Love Story isn’t intended to get you to listen so much as to get you to think. The disparity between the two types of presentations is what’s important in this context. This “machine,” as Breitz calls it, is intended to get you to question not only how content is presented but also how it’s perceived, with the aim of cutting through your assumptions. ◀