Friday, 5/3/2024
Galeria da Garagem Avenida - Guimarães
As part of
the exhibition "Stray Pieces: the Origin of Materials", a performance
with Sarah Shrbaji called " The path of Namalet: Mapping for the
urgency to reuse in the context of war ruins " will take place on May 3 at
7pm at Garagem Avenida.
This moment
revolves around a reflection during and after the workshop of 'Peças
Desgarradas: A origem dos materiai', in relation to war ruins and the path of Namalet.
The reflection evolved into a learning process about the value of forgotten
places and the categorization of value based on material and the localization
of that material. When reuse and damage assessment confront a reaction to
abandonment, especially in the aftermath of massive, selective, and deliberate
destruction of a place(s). A story unfolds somewhere in Eastern Ghouta, Syria,
progressing to a migratory escape to Portugal in 2015. During the initial phase
of the escape, the taxi, Saba Saipa, takes a wrong route to avoid a military
roadblock but ends up on a path lined with war ruins for 15 minutes. For the
migrant, the escapee, these 15 minutes encapsulate his memories of Syria. To
this day, the same route remains unchanged, as if frozen in time, like many
others in Syria. The migrant's path, described with the term Namalet (نملت)
in Syrian informal Arabic, refers to his feelings toward that scenery. Namalet
is a first-person verb-expression used to describe the feeling of emotional
numbness or neutrality towards something, an event, or life in general, often
in response to an accumulation of past events and hardships. The term
originates from the noun form Tanmeel (تنميل), which literally means the
sensation of ants in the body but metaphorically refers to emotional numbness.
For this path to be translated, a moment of reflection is divided into two
parts: a mapping of relationships and a performance.
