Mnemonic Object

Our smuggler told us to bring one suitcase and leave everything else behind. The “Mahaffa”, a hand-woven fan and an emblematic symbol or Iraq, traveled with us and our falsified passports to Sweden as we became war refugees. Now it decorates our home in the “Iraqi corner” mimicking a shrine from a problematic past. For me the questions remain, what does it mean to suture fragments in the effort to archive them and why is this so important? Perhaps this comes with the territory of being a refugee, an endless activity of collecting pieces and repetitively weaving them both as a form of mourning trauma but also as a negation to erasure. In this sense the role of memory becomes a social and political engagement and for me posses the quality to resist hegemonic control.

Essay by Sinan Antoon HERE