INTERVIEW WITH RAGHAD RESRES
By Rebecka Öhrström Kann 09/08/2024
Raghad Resres is a Jordanian-based artist whose research-centered practice enacts sensory bodily experiences and community based dialogue to examine gender and power dynamics upheld by constructed spaces. Through her methodology "Disruptive Gestures", Resres facilitates subjective experiences that raise questions about the automatic social systems structuring everyday life, unraveling such practices to reveal the limits they impose on visibility and movement in private and public spaces. We spoke about community as a decolonial tool, her research into the importance of red thread in Palestinian history, and why she prefers the term “public” over “audience”.
By Rebecka Öhrström Kann 09/08/2024
Raghad Resres is a Jordanian-based artist whose research-centered practice enacts sensory bodily experiences and community based dialogue to examine gender and power dynamics upheld by constructed spaces. Through her methodology "Disruptive Gestures", Resres facilitates subjective experiences that raise questions about the automatic social systems structuring everyday life, unraveling such practices to reveal the limits they impose on visibility and movement in private and public spaces. We spoke about community as a decolonial tool, her research into the importance of red thread in Palestinian history, and why she prefers the term “public” over “audience”.
Rebecka: To start off, how you would describe your work or practice to someone who is unfamiliar with it.
Raghad Resres: Simply, I would just say that in my recent research, I’ve been exploring how architecture affects women's bodily experiences in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where I was raised. And that is the simple way of how I would describe it, but having in mind that I have conducted my research within a white institution or in a white context, generally, makes it not only an ethical question, but also a responsibility to give a bit of a context about the Palestinian refugee camps, clarify much more and put more emphasis on colonisation as one of the main reasons behind the challenges women are facing with the camp architecture.
Raghad Resres: Simply, I would just say that in my recent research, I’ve been exploring how architecture affects women's bodily experiences in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where I was raised. And that is the simple way of how I would describe it, but having in mind that I have conducted my research within a white institution or in a white context, generally, makes it not only an ethical question, but also a responsibility to give a bit of a context about the Palestinian refugee camps, clarify much more and put more emphasis on colonisation as one of the main reasons behind the challenges women are facing with the camp architecture.
So the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan emerged as temporary refuge spaces in response to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and the subsequent Naksa of 1967, when Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their native land of Palestine by the Israeli occupation and they sought refuge in surrounding Arab countries, including Jordan. The architecture of these camps have been shaped by the practices of the camps’ residents. A significant factor is the prolonged resistance by residents to imposed changes to the architecture of the camp by the UN and hosting governments like Jordan. So people refused these changes because they viewed them as a way to sustain the camps that were supposed to be just temporary spaces, which would mean that we are staying here forever and that we are not returning to Palestine. So the architecture of the camp became unorganised and condensed because of factors similar to this, which also influences the social values and lives of the people living in the camp. In the camp, people are very connected by Arab authentic values of generosity, giving, solidarity, and a very, very strong sense of community, which is also reflected in the buildings themselves. How they are tied to each other to the limit that your window view can be the neighbour's living room. And in that case the public and the private spaces merge together in a way that blurs the line dividing them.
R: Your work is also very research heavy. I’m curious to hear about your process of making a work from that early research to the physical presentation or performance. Where do you find motivation and inspiration?
RR: At the beginning I focused on my subjective experiences. I started with my own experience and I began using or exploring a theoretical framework that investigates subjective experiences, which is called phenomenology, and through that theoretical perspective I started navigating the materials that I wanted to investigate and how I'm going to employ them in my work. I decided to start experimenting with light, fabric, and bricks, because I think that these materials are unconsciously used by patriarchal communities to restrict womens’ bodily experiences, like I said, in my experience in the refugee camp, when I described the curtains, the light and the darkness etc. In later stages of my research I realised that only focusing on my own subjective experience can be problematic. I came from a background where I was doing community based art and I come from a culture that believes that our community is a very powerful tool that we need to keep on protecting. As it is a very powerful tool to resist colonisation, and imperialism. So I had this ethical responsibility that I should include other people's subjective experiences as well. Because focusing on my own subjective experience and the individual risk losing the sense of community. Therefore I developed a methodology called “Disruptive Gestures'' that can facilitate subjective experiences for other people.
Disruptive Gestures take shape in my work such as, Dancing Edifices (2024), a series of digital paintings where I’m utilising motion sickness as a Disruptive Gesture. This work is a re-compositions of the spatial architecture of East Amman's Palestinian refugee camps,This type of motion sickness can occur when there is visual stimulation in the absence of physical movement, which can evoke uncomfortable bodily feelings that can lead one to question the their own physical experiences while facing the paintings and perhaps question their bodily relationship to the structure that the paintings show. I use Disruptive Gestures because I think our everyday experiences are automatic, unquestionable, and mundane. The social systems inform and direct us about how to behave, how to talk, how to walk, to think and even how to feel in our everyday practices so they become automatic to the extent that we cannot see or question them anymore. And therefore, a disruption can help us stop, think, and reflect or raise questions, and see things again from our own perspective or our own experience. I couldn't be able to reflect over my bodily experience with the camp's architecture without facing disruptive events in my life that enabled me to stop and rethink my everyday practices. And I want my works to be disruptive for the public aiming to facilitate subjective experiences for them.
And I want here to emphasise saying “the public '' instead of “audience” because this is part of the ethical responsibility that I described earlier regarding a lack of sense and connection to the community. I see the term “audience” associated with hierarchy, where people are passive in the process and whose role is only about perceiving art or knowledge. For me, I prefer to use the term “public,” so far, until I find another alternative that can describe the relationship I am aspiring for when sharing my work with the public.
R: I think that point of the hierarchy associated with the term is such an important point to make. I’m curious to hear a little bit about the role of collaboration and participation in your practice, as employed in works including Out Loud Conversation (2020) and your recent workshops. I would also be interested to hear how you create performances and installations that the audience has to actively navigate?
RR: Throughout my research, I have read a chapter of The Emancipated The Spectator, Jacques Rancière, that questions the audience passivity in theatre, where the role of the audience is to watch and perceive knowledge. This reading helped me reflect and think through my role and my art role in the public space. And as a person who already has experience with participatory art forms, like participatory theatre and community based art, this reading inspired me to define a role that I was unconsciously following as an artist, the active participant, meaning the artist themselves is present in the creative process when they balance their engagement with their own artistic project and the social framework in a critical, reflexive, and continuous manner. This is possible, I think, when the artist experiences the artwork from the perspective of the public. During the process of developing the artistic project, the artist can be an active participant when they investigate the creative work with a willingness to engage with it beyond their initial intentions or expectations, based on an engagement with the public. What helped me develop this definition was also my experience working with the public from one of the refugee camps in Jordan. To do collaborations was an ethical decision I made in response to the role of the active participant, aiming to get the public I am presenting my art to engaged and active in the process of research and artmaking or development. Especially, after I realised that I got detached from my community after I started living away from the camp. I wanted to make sure that I am in touch with women there and that there is a conversation between me, the research project, and them.
When I went back to Amman in the first year of my studies to do the first workshop for this research project, I realised that I had a culture shock because I have been detached from my community to the point that I couldn't easily communicate with the women there. I felt that I was so far away and that they don’t really think that I belong to here, to the camp space. Which raises a lot of questions about my role as an artist and helps me continue developing how I am working with the community and it brings to my intention the importance of keeping working with the community in a continuous manner to keep in touch with it. Otherwise, my art will not make sense to people there.
R: It’s really interesting that you come from theatre, I think that makes so much sense looking at your practice. Who/or what are some of your influences that helped you develop the language of your work?
RR: Yeah. As I mentioned before, my background is in community based work, the women living in the camps have also influenced my practice a lot in the way they engage with and respond to my workshops and artworks, and the process of developing my role and how I define myself in the public space. Also the conversations and collaborations with the Syrian artist and architect Khuloud Hifzy, living in Gothenburg. In her research project, Sewing a City Story, she used weaving as a methodology to tell our stories as women within the city. I also want to mention my Syrian friend and artist, Alqumit Alhamad. He was my classmate at Valand and is also based in Gothenburg. In his work, Alhamad explores how he is using symbolism even in the “free world” in the West, where his practice should be “free”, but he is still using symbolism because he's not feeling safe speaking freely about important issues for an Arab Queer refugee living in Sweden. The discussions and even debates I have had with Alqumit inspired the articulation of my work as well. I've also been influenced by theoretical sources like Sarah Ahmad and her Queer Phenomenology, and also Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, where I investigated how we can witness and wonder about our own experiences? Because witnessing is not only about seeing, but it is also about questioning and understanding the experience itself, from the first person point of view. The practice of the Palestinian architect and artist Sandi Hilal, based in Stockholm and the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, have also been important and I interpret both of them as using a form of destructive gesture in their practices.
R: You mentioned sewing in relation to Hifzy’s research project Sewing a City Story. Your work also employs sewing and thread, both in performances and installations. Could you speak a little bit about the importance of sewing as a medium in your practice?
RR: As I mentioned before, I decided to explore these materials, the light, the fabric in the form of threads, and the bricks etc, in this project, because I think that communities utilize them unconsciously to restrict women’s bodily movement. I was trying to understand fabric which I think is an important material in our culture and history as Palestinians, especially the red threads in the fabric of our Palestinian Thobs. I realised while I was doing my research that before, Palestinian women would use red thread to symbolise that they are ready for marriage. When women are ready for marriage, they start using so much red threads and their Thobs. There is a saying told to Palestinian women getting married that they “wish them a life with red and yellow”, which means a life with all that they should have as women in their life. This really haunted me throughout the whole process. But I think that generally I am interested in understanding the social fabric, and I’m trying to understand how fabric can sometimes restrict us, and in other times release us. It’s a relationship that I'm aiming to understand across different artistic projects and in my research.
R: You’ve touched on this in the conversation already, but your work often examines bodily experiences and reactions to various socio-spatial environments, such as Dancing Edifices but also Sewing the Room and your recent workshop Whispers in Concrete at Hammarkullen. Could you speak a little about how you examine these embodied experiences in space throughout your practice.
RR: I suppose I can add to it by speaking about my work, Sewing the Room. I used this specific piece to question other spaces as well, not only the refugee camp where I'm living. I showed this work for my graduation at Slakthuset in Gamlestaden, Gothenburg, an area that has been facing gentrification. Sewing the Room, which is an experiential performance where I sew my body and the public's with the very fabric of the room itself. Through this act, I am aiming to disrupt the social and physical boundaries of the space, inviting the public to question the impact of social and architectural challenges of a space and how they affect bodily experiences and practices. The performance reaches its climax as I sew my feet onto a fabric map representing my hometown in East Amman, aiming to spatialize my personal experience with social constraints and transform it into a tool for critiquing different social challenges that affect bodily practices in other spaces. The act of sewing the public with the thread, which by the way is the same thread I am using to sew the map into my feet, can trigger internal and external bodily sensations to the public, which, I think, can facilitate an experience where one may rethink their physical experience in the space and their bodily relation to the space created by connecting the threads to their body to the room fabric and other people in the room. Transforming a space that faced gentrification into an art gallery was in contradiction with my role as an active participant, therefore, I organised a talk with the Palestinian Professor Dr. Feras Hammami living in Gothenburg, who has been doing research on the gentrification of Gamlestaden.
The same approach was followed to do the workshop Whispers in Concrete with women from Hammarkullen, I used my digital paintings series Dancing Edifices to embody my physical experience with architecture, in order to use it as a tool or a methodology to follow to rethink our bodily relationships as women with the architecture and the social fabric in Hammarkullen, which turned out to be a positive relationship. As the community of Hammarkullen is mostly a refugee community where people share universal community values.
R: I’m curious if you could speak a little bit about exhibiting your work in Sweden and perhaps presenting your work to a more white audience with, assumably, a lesser understanding of the Palestinian genocide and the experience of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, opposed to exhibiting your work in in Jordan, and how you approach those different audiences (or if you feel like you do)?
RR: Yeah, this is a difficult question because during my studies I received this question from my supervisors so many times. Because my work is about the refugee camps in Jordan, how do people here (in Sweden) understand or relate to this work. I really struggled with this question, because it also adds so much heaviness on my shoulders to always need to over explain my work, or always have to find ways to relate it to the Swedish community or to the white community in general. I have had huge ethical obligations to explain the context of my project every single time I talk about it because of the propaganda in the West and how it’s media is so controlled by the government, as well as the need for educating people about what is actually happening in the Levant region and the role that the European governments play in supporting wars, genocides, and occupation of our lands.
Refuge experiences, wars, and genocides in the Levant region shouldn't be understood as something out of the white European context. Occupation and the horrific wars in the region are funded by European governments, including the Swedish Government. So my project in a white context is highly relevant and important to the Swedish community and its art scene.
There is a need that us, the global majority, speak about our experiences in white contexts, even if white people do not understand it completely, because they have a responsibility to go and educate themselves to understand their and their government's role in our crises. Just me being there in this context when people are not fully understanding or not fully making sense or able to connect to my projects is in itself a disruptive gesture. One of the questions that I got after an exhibition I have done in Sweden that was really strange but makes sense at the same time is, “What is a refugee camp?” I was trying to explain my experience in a refugee camp, but I didn't understand that the person literally did not know what a refugee camp was. The question shows how the west's control over the media made its population detached from reality. So the white public has to relate to my work. And, again, just me being in a white context with a work that people cannot understand can, again, be a Disruptive Gesture that can help white people to stop and question the system that imposes its racist and biassed narrative to white population. And this is part of my research.
R: What’s next for you?
RR: Next I'm working on two projects. One of them is a continuation of this research project where I will focus much more on decolonial practices in my research. I call this project Reclaiming the Space where me and Khuloud Hifzy will develop a workshop working with women living in the refugee camp. The aim is to create interventions to the camp space where we transform the rooftops of the refugee camps into exhibition spaces for women to exhibit their works where they speak about their experience and their bodily experience with the architecture of the camp. And we’ll make it a public space so that everyone in the camp can visit and we can utilise the space to open conversations about this. The other project is called The Apocalyptic Self, inspired by the Palestinian poet and writer George Abraham’s notion of the “Apocalyptic Self”, where I'm exploring the Apocalyptic Self that appeared in a Palestinian woman living in Western world. Abraham describes the Apocalyptic Self as the multiplicity of the selves that are hosted in our bodies, the selves that survive, and the selves that we have to kill in order to become.