As a Palestinian-Canadian artist I am surrounded by tragic oral stories from or about Palestine through my archival studies, film programming, and colleagues’ art practices. They are raw and they hit me in the chest like a rock against a wall.

To protect myself, I fold my hand across my body and perform the sign of the cross. My mother taught me how to pray, it was also a lesson in transformation. I pray for some of the same reasons my mother performs the gesture: for support, to reverse a curse, to ward off evil, to sanctify the day. But in moments of tension and defeat I use prayer to connect to my body, in the moment that it escapes me.

By closing my eyes and touching my forehead, my chest, and both of my breasts, I connect with my body in the same way I connect during sex, while showering or as I bite down on fresh bread. It grounds me and I come out less tense. I transfer my guilt, my pain, my empathy into this symbolic gesture, transferring it out of my body, a performed exorcism. With my mother’s lesson I’m transformed, and the stories are transformable.

As these stories undergo a rebirth or metamorphoses via song, a painting, or a film, they lose a little bit of their gut-punch. When I take these stories and transform them into a bodily gesture, they lose a little bit of their gut-punch. When I take my mother’s history, her life events and her impact on my life, and transform them into oil paintings, they too, lose a little bit of their gut-punch.

I explored the notion of motherhood in ancient Greek culture in my first book “The play of words”, a study of interfamilial violence in Aeschylus’ tragic play “Oresteia”. In this book, I argue that the main factor of the play's discourse about violence is the attempt to define the character of Clytemnestra by her role as mother, wife and queen. This Aeschylean work is not simply a condemnation of Clytemnestra, but a complex commitment to the issue of her female authority (as mother, wife and queen).

The traditional reading of the play interprets Clytemnestra as a bad mother, as an adulterous wife and as the murderess of Agamemnon, King of Argos-winner of the war against Troy. From this perspective, matricide is an act that reestablishes Agamemnon’s authority as father, husband and victorious king. However, in my work I show how the narrative of the play is not indicative of the justification of violence against the mother figure. I argue instead that Clytemnestra’s maternal criticism of Agamemnon’s warlike violence, and her claim to the inviolability of the mother’s body, and of the blood connection between mother and child, are necessary conditions for peace and justice in the family and also, in society.

The question of justice, can we justify the murder of a mother, is presented as a tragic question, a question that poses a dilemma, and not a straightforward answer.

In his famous 1980 essay Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes writes, “In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: “my mother” and “To the Mother-as-Good, she had added that grace of being an individual soul” (1982, 75).

In mourning for his mother, Barthes faces a field of tension between one’s own mother as a singular being and the figure of the Mother as a cultural construct, which lay at the centre of my investigation of literary and philosophical treatments of dead or dying mothers: from Giorgio Caproni’s 1959 poetry collection “Il seme del piangere”, through to Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” and his posthumous “Mourning Diary”, to Jacques Derrida’s “Circumfession”.

Derrida writes his mourning text in close dialogue with the prototype in Western literature, what he calls the “dubious exercise” (1993, 36–37) of writing about the death of the writer’s mother, Augustine’s “Confessions”. Thus, I have extended my investigation to the crucial role that Augustine’s mother Monica plays not only at the moment of her death, but throughout the first autobiographical part of the Confessions, which ends with her death at Ostia.

I am interested, on the one hand, in the particular dimensions of time, history and self-narration that mothers seem to evoke in their mourning sons. and, on the other Hand, in how these texts gesture towards a confessional form that exhibits the event of writing in which the subject is being constituted in relation to an other.

The essay I wrote with Giulia Maria Chesi for this project, entitled “The Dreams of the Mother”, stems from this broader research and discusses Monica’s dream in the Confessions alongside Clytemnestra’s dream in Aeschylus’ “Libation Bearers”. Both are influential instances in the Western tradition of mothers’ dreams, proving decisive in shaping the lives of their sons.

“Weeds: (for the Natufians)” is a research-based poem on the Mesolithic, proto-agricultural, Natufian culture in Palestine and Lebanon. The poem was first commissioned by Omar Berrada for the Tamawuj site that accompanied the 2018 Sarjah Biennial 13. On the bank of the Gartempe River, which flows from my village to Angles-sur-Anglin. I made a recording of the text as a contribution for Simone Fattal’s 2020 show “Fix Your Gaze Upon Saturn’s Rings” at Bergen Kunsthall.

My curiosity about the Natufian culture began with the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968), a professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge and the first woman to hold a professorial chair. Garrod, who first named and directed the excavation of Natufian village sites and employed Palestine women to carry out the digs, retired to the Nouvelle Aquitaine region. In 1949, with two other women archaeologists, Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin and Germaine Henri-Martin, she excavated a Magdalenian site that had been popularly known as the Roche aux Sorciéres (Witch’s Rock). Their work revealed an extensive relief frieze in a 15,000 BCE cave site.

Garrod’s excavations showed that woman had powerful roles in Natufian communities, perhaps as shamans. She discovered the body of such a shamanness, adorned with a girdle of fox teeth, in a rich grave of magical artifacts.

I cannot make any claims about the Natufian relationship to Goddess worship, but I do think that Dorothy Garrod’s work has revealed an important material pre-history of the role of women in archaic society, and that Garrod herself is an inspiring figure in the long history of women’s intellectual and ritual life.

“...made without guarantee or the expectation of harmony with those who are not oneself—and not safely other, either. Neither one nor other, that is who we all are and always have been.” – Donna Haraway

My imaginings for the future of goddess mythology, symbols and thus, body representation were handed to me via the work of archaeo-mythologist, Marija Gimbutas. Visibly hybrid and grotesque: animal meets human; a tree for a leg or an arm; obscured or exaggerated genitals and fuller stomachs, are all inklings Taken from Gimbutas’ research and ancient archaeological discoveries. rendering these hybrids (on paper rather than through sculpture as I usually do) helped me to create a space for my own sense of “ongoingness”.

“Ongoingness” (for me) includes the possibility of escaping or, at the very least, frequently scheduled times of solace. Because as I discovered, through my exploration of goddess mythology, living a life (regardless of its ordinariness) is also actively creating and participating in myth. And with this comes the responsibilty of defining one’s sense of belonging.

With these drawings I am trying to avoid being wrong, particularly in-body. With our identities so rooted in image, in the body, those that refuse to be one, that luxuriate in being more than one, help to temper the pitfalls of rigid categorization and competition.

Attempting to create a heightened sense of embodiment, connection, and worldliness without delving into the realm of “self-care” or sheer sensation, I travel through form via silent communication, trying to talk to a constantly shifting physical and emotional self; what some might call the soul or the sacred, what Gimbutas and her followers might call The Goddess.

Among other attributes and purposes, myths offer us a larger context within which to lay our individual suffering. Archetypal figures convey the universal, ancient, and impersonal, and within this container they bestow on us a map, which enables us to better navigate ourselves and make sense of the world. Our suffering finds a place, it has necessity. It belongs in our transformative, inner journey. Everyone (who has lived some years!) has their own narrative about going to hell and back . . . of descending into Hades, encountering and meeting its darkness and returning again. This death and rebirth pattern is a constant theme in myths, for as Voltaire said, "It is no more surprising to be born twice than once - everything in nature is resurrection.”

My work these past few years has been inspired by Persephone. How does the soul come to love that which lives in the underworld? How are we even acquainted with, and initiated into, this subterranean realm? Why is it necessary to be abducted from our intense identification with Demeter’s life, lived on the surface, to encounter Hades and all that lies below? And can, like Persephone, we belong to, and partner with, both the upper and underworld?

Although in ancient Greece several initiation rites were dedicated to the Goddess Artemis, she was and still is the symbol par excellence for the dissolution of boundaries, as reflected in the sites of her cult, in transitional regions between nature and the urban center.

The rituals, the iconography, and the myths connected to her go far beyond her traditional interpretation as a fertility goddess. Artemis is more than that. As protectress of the whole of nature, she rules all that constitutes the cycle of life and death. This artemisian attribute of fluidity and universality is found in Jasmine Reimer’s art and could be seen as a possible solution to the current context, which is characterized by the setting of boundaries, labels, and the trend to strictly define even undefinable concepts. My contribution to the project consists of the reevaluation of this multiplicity shown via the broader observation of the Artemisian cult.

While being in the field is my favourite aspect of archaeology, I have also worked as a student assistant in Numismatics at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as in the DFG project "The Terracotta Figurines of the Achaemenid Period: New Perspectives Based on the Unpublished Material from Tell Mardikh, Syria", at the Institute for Southwest Asian Archaeology at The Freie Universität Berlin.

I have also participated in many workshops such as the 21st Berlin- Copenhagen Seminar on "Gender and Archaeology", and „Questions of Sex, Gender and Function" with the presentation entitled "A world in fragments - Depositional Practices on the EBA Cyclades: A Case study from Kavos (Keros) and Dhaskalio in the Southeastern Aegean“.

“A common observation made by therapists [...] is that hoarding is triggered by the death of a parent, child, or marriage, or even by an “empty nest,” (especially in the case of women hoarders)”. -Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency”

This series of watercolours challenges the relationship between subject and object, in relation to hoarding. This is a deeply personal project for me, and the drawings are inspired by lived experience.

The images depict a female figure in oppressive home interiors surrounded by masses of banal objects of little monetary value. Piles of toilet paper are strewn across the floor, objects are fastidiously netted, and the figure lives in harmony with her clutter. Many hoarders have stated that the objects have ‘done it to themselves’, implying an agency of things. Hoarding is often considered shameful, taboo and an illness. Hoarders are deemed freaks on mainstream television, and the complexities are hidden. It is a subject rarely discussed in art despite its object-based fixation.