Federica Bueti: Living Alongside the Holy and the Cursed

Two years ago, multidisciplinary artist Shuruq Harb and I began our conversations around our desire to find a language to speak of our regions, which share the same sea and a complicated history, in a way that would neither reduce them to one comparable whole nor set them in binary oppositions. We come from the Mediterranean basin – from Calabria, Italy, and Palestine. Even though these places are subdued to different jurisdictions and politics in the contemporary world, we share similar topographies, landscapes, temperatures, temperaments, flora, ancient histories, and ruins. We also feel stuck in our places of origin: Calabria is stuck within Italian politics and the country’s division between North and South. Calabrians have to rely on a precarious economy based on tourism, which fails to create a sense of rootedness or agency of their future. Palestine is a more complex and highly volatile environment. The jurisdiction of the land is being contested in a way that makes it difficult for Palestinian artists to freely move, live, and work without constantly having to explain or justify their existence and practice, liberate their imagination, and imagine a future beyond nationalistic claims. We meant to examine a different possibility of living alongside ruins and in villages and towns that grew around ruins from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine eras.

While breaking down the myth of the “cursed” and the “holy” lands within the Western-European narrative, we wanted to critically assess the ways in which archaeology has been used to extract the putative essence of the nation-state, which grows its roots in the timeline of its birth and ascents. We wanted to question how these territories were made into the “cursed” and “holy” lands, both defined by the impossibility of different futures. By deconstructing the extractivist logic that links archaeological artifacts to cultural tourism and nationalist agendas, we wished to challenge the symbolism connected to the ruins and imagine other ways. Which archaeological practices and history writing practices are available, and what inhabitation of time and space are possible beyond extraction, surveillance, and the erection of walls to protect and preserve the “holiness” of sites?

We both felt the need to use art and imagination to narrate those histories and their implications in our daily lives, as well as find ways out of this sense of impossibility – an “impossibility to return” – to imagine a different future that characterizes the places we come from. The sea became our means of transportation, the site of imagination.

In 2022, when we finally had the opportunity to be physically in the same place, in Athens, which is for us both geographically, historically, and symbolically a middle point, we decided that the best way to approach our project was to be fully open to the chance encounters, context and situations of the locale of Athens, while keeping the sea, its geography, and history, as our compass. We decided to use walking and talking as a method and a practice of thinking and conceptualizing a politics of passage and movement based on bodily intuitions, conversations, and dialogue with maritime historians, historians of the sea, artists and cultural practitioners, common people in the streets of Athens, only to “find the sea” in unexpected and unconventional places.

Our research started taking shape as we walked through the hills of Philopappos and Lycabettus, the ruins of the Acropolis, down toward the sea, to Glyfada, through a walk that lasted more than four hours, during which we did some environmental sound and video recordings. We walked to Pireaus and its harbor, where we spent hours observing the maritime traffic – the big cargo, passenger, tourist, and military ships docking and leaving the big port. We wanted to explore the space around, on, in, and about, and that emerged because of the sea. Looking west, looking east by northeast, looking northwest, looking northeast, looking south, looking north, looking east, looking west, looking north, looking northeast, old ships.

Our walks and observations of the environment around us, with its not surprising familiarity, were punctuated by meetings and important encounters with maritime historian Gelina Harlaftis and the team she is leading in the reconstruction of the Onassis Maritime archive, as well as with practitioners based in Athens who have been working on the histories of the sea and the Mediterranean basin. During these encounters, we learned more about the maritime history of the Mediterranean from the perspective of the Greek shipping industry and history. This led us to the Liberty Ship Museum in Pireaus. This Liberty Ship was donated by the Unites States to Greece as an archive and memorial of the contribution of Greece to the liberation of Europe from Nazi fascism. Today the ship has turned into a museum, and thus we approached it as a ruin, a shipwreck; the material remnants of a particular historical period; the presence of an absence, the site of an event that has happened or it has yet to happen. We filmed inside the belly of the ship, which has been transformed into an archival display of the journeys of the various liberty ships owned by Greek ship-owners, as well as outside, documenting the soundscape, the endless movement, and the absence of movement in all the things in motion.

Our choice of filming inside the Liberty Ship and its surroundings was a way of seeking a visual and poetic language to speak of absence, loss, the absence of hope, interruptions, and the impossibility to return. The sea, as a place of passage, global trade, police control, tourism, and migration, allows us to speak of the sense of loss and of being stuck that both Shuruq and I have experienced in our respective regions, Calabria and Palestine. The Liberty Ship thus became an entry point, rather than the central focus of our investigation, a vessel and a map to navigate and access the histories of trade routes, off-shore business models, and smuggling; to reflect on what resists the impulse to be archived and preserved; to find a language to address the unspoken, unrecorded histories of subversive ways of movement of goods and people across the region of the Mediterranean basin.

So, the research period in Athens, on the one hand, offered us an opportunity to start developing our historical, formal, and material research. On the other hand, it has set us to sail, propelling our research forward.