Inkjet on Glass, 30x30x150 cm, 2017
The work is the act; the work is possession. Perhaps nothing has remained from the age of the leftists and their cyclical defeat except my father’s pride in the fact that they managed to expel the feudal families, the property owners, from their lands in the sixties. My father tries to be a farmer but he keeps going back to Lenin’s To the Rural Poor: The Class Struggle in the Countryside.
In South Lebanon, there are large areas of land that have never been officially surveyed by the state , meaning that the official land registry authorities have never, in Lebanon’s history, surveyed these lands to issue official ownership documents or to define the boundaries between communal and private properties. In my village, starting after the year 2000, people began claiming ownership of such lands. My father used to send letters of objection to the local governor, protesting how public assets, like a water spring or a field, were being turned into private property. After several years, he realized that all those letters were pointless. So he walked to a piece of rugged, sloped, and difficult-to-cultivate land and decided to work it and claim it as his own.
Photography by Marwan Tahtah.
Part of There Is No Right Or Wrong Here, Solo exhibition, Marfa Gallery.
