Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 251: How Far Can A Marked Body Go? — with Ghinwa Yassine
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Ghinwa Yassine
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Kathy Feng 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ghinwa Yassine, a Lebanese anti-disciplinary artist whose work confronts the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in, while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. Am and Ghinwa discuss her recent multi-media installations and ongoing artistic research into gestural agency and freedom. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:44
Hello. Welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week, we have a very special guest, Ghinwa Yassine, is with us. Welcome, Ghinwa.
Ghinwa Yassine 0:54
Thank you.
Am Johal 0:55
Yeah, Ghinwa, why don't we start with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Ghinwa Yassine 1:00
Yeah. So my name is Ghinwa Yassine or Ghinwa, and I'm from Lebanon. I refer to myself as an anti-disciplinary artist, and I mostly work with multidisciplinary multimedia installations, video performance. And most of my work is narrative based. I do a lot of writing.
Am Johal 1:20
Why don't we start with that term, anti disciplinary. Seems like problematic. You sound like a troublemaker. So maybe, if you could just share what you mean by anti-disciplinary artist.
Ghinwa Yassine 1:32
It's so funny, because ever since I had that in my email signature, I would get—even from people I don't know—I would get like, oh, I like your title. Like they get all excited about it. Like, okay, it opens a conversation, which is nice. So the first time I heard this term, I was actually in a class. We were talking about ethnography. And this term started mostly with the discipline of ethnography, because there was this tendency to not want to just, you know, with the Western gaze, document these other populations or peoples. And through just the writing, observing and writing, and then there was a lot of, you know, practices of filming, drawing, or even comics among ethnographers and anthropologists. But I remember when I read this, it just like, hit me, you know, like I just knew that I identify with this word a lot without necessarily digging deep into it yet. And it's just like as if there was this category that I identified with and that felt right, and I realized that, obviously I have a big discomfort around mastery. And just having to fit in one discipline, where you lose the freedom to explore the potential of the intersections of things. And that's always... has been how I work. So part of it is the need to explore these areas that are not necessarily afforded by—up till recently, you know—by institutions, academic institutions, where you know you're supposed to specialize in things, especially coming from a non art background, into art and feeling like, I still feel entitled to make art, even though I'm not an artist by training. And I was struggling with this whole idea of having to have a degree to somehow fit into something. And I feel like the mastery also comes from a very colonial place of... There's a lot of, you know, lineages in different disciplines of where you need to be the competition, that's usually very male-led. And, yeah, I think that describes...
Am Johal 3:46
Yeah, there's a really great book by Julietta Singh, who's been on our podcast before, around rethinking mastery that's quite good and really interesting, speaking with her about it. Now, you came to SFU to do a Master's, but I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to before your arrival here. Of course, you lived in other places, and you were doing lots of other things before and wondering if you could speak a little bit to your time prior to your arrival in Vancouver.
Ghinwa Yassine 4:15
So I grew up in Beirut. I was born in '84. At the end of '84, there was still a civil war. I stayed there till, I guess, I was 23, 24. I moved to Saudi Arabia to move in with my ex husband at the time. This was my first, like, rupture from my home country. And also, I guess that the first time someone moves, there's always some kind of rupture. And then I lived there for about two and a half years. It was really tough in terms of the culture and the restrictions on women at the time. I did have a beautiful job. I was teaching graphic design at the time. I had just graduated, but then somehow ended up teaching at a university level. And I was teaching at a school that— a really good design school, but it was mostly, where it was all women. And I did work a little bit there, and I remember we had to hide, women had to hide if like, inspection comes, we were not allowed to work, non segregated places. So there was a room for women to hide in case an inspection comes. And I remember like, feeling scared all the time. So anyway, I had really terrible mental health issues, maybe the only time in my life where I struggled really hard, and then I— we managed to move to Dubai, where my ex was working before Saudi Arabia. And it's funny, because I was following like, the provider at the time. And like feeling that something's wrong, but not having the agency to kind of fight that. And then I always knew I wanted to go to Europe, and I wanted to study there before falling in love and getting married and all that. And so I left Dubai. I went alone to study in the Netherlands. I did my first Master's there in video design, which was really open, like no courses, you could do whatever you want. And I ended up doing my first video installation, and maybe my best so far, I don't know, but it just didn't get exposure because it was this huge project, like big room with suspended furniture, and there was no way to transport it and move it, etc. And then I wanted to stay there, but I had an accident, and then I left back to Dubai. I was unhappy to have to go back. Because of health. I like, fractured my spine. I needed help. And then I worked a bit again in the design industry, because there's no art, like support for artists or grants in the Arab world in general, or most grants come from outside. I still don't know how to navigate that, or where to like, where to make art in Dubai, where everything is so corporate. And I was still like, again, unhappy, and I wanted to move again. And then the only stable option was going to be immigration. And so I applied to immigrate to Canada, and we got it right away because of my, like, high English grades or whatever, you know, like master's degree and French education and all that. It was really easy and simple. And I came here, and then I was like, Okay, I need to learn about the art scene. I need to know how to enter the art scene, how it works here, and I don't want to do design anymore. I was so unhappy being a designer at that time, I was just like, having physical pain every time I would go behind the computer. And I had a two year old, one and a half year old daughter. I was like, I'm going back to school. So I just, I looked, I went, visited the three schools here, UBC, Emily Carr, and SFU, and I knew I needed to go to SFU. So I only applied to SFU, and I got in, and I've been just making art since then. And I separated. So much happened.
Am Johal 7:53
Wondering if you could talk just a little bit, you know, that transition from, you know, working in graphic design, doing other things, and, you know, I having lived in the Middle East for a year as well. It's like common for somebody to be a journalist, artist, and people are doing three or four different things because of just the nature of forms of resistance, the desire to express those kinds of things.
Ghinwa Yassine 8:13
Yeah.
Am Johal 8:14
And here, things tend to be a lot more siloed in terms of the different things that people take on.
Ghinwa Yassine 8:19
Yeah, I remember getting in trouble at that design firm I used to work at. It was like, this multinational branding agency, really big and, you know, like, it's funny, because when I was being interviewed, they're like, negotiating the salary, and they're like, this company is a school, you know, like, you're gonna learn so much. I'm like, if I wanted to go to school, I would go to school, you know, because, yeah, labor laws and the Arab world, no, nothing. And, like, especially for a woman like you earn way less, earn way less than a man. But design, to be honest, like, I think I can still think of myself as a designer. I mean, what the story I was going to tell, like, getting in trouble because I had this, yeah, need to resist. And I remember the war started in Syria, and I sent an email like, hey, let's create oil packaging and sell it and donate. Like, we'll just get oil from Syria and we'll do a really cool packaging, because we were all about branding and packaging, and, like, I was passionate about design, and then the proceeds will go to help people. And I get an email back from the director of the company, and he was appalled. He was Syrian, but he needed to, like, protect the whole company. It was like, impossible to talk about politics in Dubai. No sex, no drugs, no politics. So what are you going to talk about, you know? I think that's mostly what was making me feel unhappy, more than the fact that I was doing design, because now I miss sometimes that aspect, and it helps me a lot in how I think about space design and installations. And even like to make it as an artist, you need to be an entrepreneur. And if I didn't have that corporate background, I would have never made it as an artist here, and I see how other people struggle. But because I have been exposed to the business side, that helps me a lot.
Am Johal 10:10
I'm wondering if you— I know that you've had a long standing involvement as well with the MENA film festival as well, wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.
Ghinwa Yassine 10:18
Yeah, so when I came here around, well, five years ago, I came here around six years ago or seven. And five years ago, I wanted to do a documentary film about this woman that I would keep running into on the street and on the buses. And apparently she's a famous artist. I hope she's still alive. I don't know where she is, but her name is Virginia Quental, and apparently she was involved in the founding of Emily Carr. She's one of those people who people don't know anything about right now. And she's Brazilian originally. And I wanted to make a documentary about her before, right before coming, going to school here. And I went to this event, a booze and schmooze, like a networking event for filmmakers, with my friend Anaïs, who's Moroccan Quebecois. So she's Canadian, like, born and raised here, and we run into— we meet this guy, Arman, and he's Iranian Canadian, also born and raised here. And he was like, oh, you know what? Like, it's such a shame that we don't have any festivals for Iranian films. We have so many amazing films in Iran I'm like, yeah, that's totally true. Well, if you think of something... And he's like, we need to start something. I'm like, well, if it includes Lebanon or the Middle East, I'll be happy to join. And Anaïs was like, and if we include North [Africa], I'll be happy to join. And then we started the film festival five years ago, and so we're co-founders, co-directors. Anaïs was on a— like sabbatical last year, but she's joining again, and now we're a team of around eight, nine people, and it's been growing because there's a demand. It takes up a lot of my time but I do it as a passion project.
Am Johal 11:54
Wondering if you can speak a little bit to your time as a grad student at SFU, the kinds of projects that you're working on, and sort of some of the ideas that still influence your practice?
Ghinwa Yassine 12:06
At SFU, it was interesting, because I always think about, like, art school like a mental rehab, rather than, you know... whatever psychology ward.
Am Johal 12:15
Tuition is expensive, but cheaper than counseling.
Ghinwa Yassine 12:19
It's like, it's been so interesting to just see how we were all like unraveling and struggling, because you're shedding and understanding who you are. But anyway, I started getting very interested in researching trauma studies, mostly art about trauma, but also more somatic things. Like, I delved deep into psychology and somatics, but I was starting to think about body memory. Like, I remember reading Charlotte Delbo, who coined that sense memory, I think I might be mixing up words. I hope I'm not butchering them. But at the time, all I knew how to do was to write autobiographically. And my first Master's thesis was about that in the Netherlands, was called the artist as artwork, looking at various artists who put their lives at the center of their work. And I was thinking like, one day I won't have the need for that, because one day, I will have healed so many things or everything, that I will just be able to do it for the beauty, for like painting mountains, because I saw people do that. You know, some people don't need to, have to resist anything. And so I was reading a lot about that. But then at the last year... And I did a clowning class, and that was brutal, with Steven Hill. He likes to keep it brutal. Yeah, he likes the reputation that the class has. But I was also, yeah, starting to do collaboration with dancers. I was discovering that I need to move, or I am a mover, and not just a filmmaker, because mostly I had done film before, and I discovered, I realized that actually all my films include me as a performer. And I gave myself the permission to just have fun and collaborated with a dancer, Luciana Fortes, twice, and we had little shows in the city here. And at the end of the program, when covid started, that's when I was thinking about my graduation project on what I wanted to do, and starting to read about phenomenology and gesture, more about embodiment. And then the uprising started in Beirut, 2019. And there was this video that went viral of a woman giving a man a side kick in the crotch on the streets. And he was armed. He was a bodyguard of some politician, and her name is Malak Alaywe. And everybody was just arrested by this video. And they turned it into illustrations, different kinds of illustrations. The picture was everywhere. People were putting it as an avatar, and then it became the icon of the— some people refused to call it revolution. I still think it was a revolution in the sense that it turned into a Feminist Revolution, because for the first time, we were only seeing on the street, more women than men and women playing various roles. And I knew I wanted to do something with this icon. Because, first of all, I was witnessing an icon in the making, and as a woman, a person with a woman's body, I was feeling mirrored in a way. I even thought about how I would never be able to do that, even if I had a black belt in karate. And that woman had some kind of, you know, black belt in something, I don't remember, but she was trained, a trained martial artist. And I knew it was going to be forgotten, and I wanted to somehow seize it and maybe immortalize the moment, because it was a big moment that I was witnessing, and I I just decided to get obsessed with the side kick. So apparently this politician came to the street, towards the protesters, to be like, Oh, hey, I'm with you, you know, like, I'm gonna support you. And they were angry, and they were like, no, get away from here. And his bodyguard to protect him tried to shoot his rifle in the air. And at that moment, this woman came outta nowhere, and just like gave him the perfect side kick.
Am Johal 16:17
That used to be the finishing move of Bret the Hitman Hart, professional wrestler. The sidekick.
Ghinwa Yassine 16:22
Yeah, and at the time, I had no relationship with the side kick itself, but I started training with my personal trainer to do the sidekick and to understand how it works. And I asked people, friends, women from Lebanon about if they ever kicked a man in the crotch. And some said we did it, like I kicked my dad, figuratively. And then this other woman said, I actually did the same thing in the same area in a different protest years ago. She was in a protest and a man groped her, and she has a black belt in karate. That's my best friend. And she intuitively turned and kicked him, and he fell on the floor, and she looked and she got so scared, and she left and ran, started running. And I was thinking, what makes one person able to defend themselves and another unable to defend themselves, and what is this embodied agency? And that's when I—I think I coined this term, I still don't, haven't seen it anywhere else—but it's like gestural agency or agentic gesture. I was looking at these archival images. And I just was probably looking at pictures for two months, you know, just pictures and sourcing them. And that turned into another project. But my graduation project was the kick queen. It was called KickQueen because Malak was nicknamed the kick queen. I created this kind of fictional, semi fictional narrative, because I like mixing fact and fiction, and that was like related to covid, because when covid started, when I was working on this project, the protests stopped. People had to leave and go back home, and then they got fed up again, and they went down to the street. So there was this constant, you know, like cycle of interruption. And I was witnessing here people feeling completely disrupted, where I was feeling very safe, because I'm very used to schools closing because there's bombing. Businesses like going bankrupt because there's bombing. Your dreams going on hiatus because there is bombing. So for me, covid was just like almost this image of here time— progress is possible and time is linear. I remembered my friends in the Netherlands saving for their retirement at the age of 19, you know? Where this is something we would never think about in Lebanon. And I just like, imagine the scenario where when the kick happens, when the foot touches the crotch, a portal opens, where time becomes linear and progress is possible, and where any woman who's ever hit a man on the crotch exists in this kind of fantastical realm. And that turned into an installation, yeah.
Am Johal 19:12
Coming from where you do, where the cycle of political protest or unrest or the breaking out of conflict and war is sort of ever present. And the notion of resistance takes the body out in different ways. There's the being out in physical protest, there's the act of momentarily hiding and being away, or these aspects of what you call the somatic forms of resistance. But it marks itself in the body in various ways, through trauma, through scarring, through memory, and as you think through your work like this one particular project, but you've worked in so many different ways in terms of trying to elevate or make visible the politics in a different form. By taking the body into public space in a different way.
Ghinwa Yassine 20:02
Yeah. So after that project, I knew that I needed to work more on this idea of embodied agency and to look at the bodies of women in the pictures. That's why I started to look at a lot of archival images, and I worked with them for the first time. And I made this project called How Far Can a Marked Body Go? Shown into an installation— a performance, a long performance. My first. I didn't expect that to happen. It just happened. And then a film as well. And I was reading Judith Butler, about the politics of assembly, like the paper called Bodies in Alliance and the inherent space of appearance. That to be free, you need to be able to occupy this space of appearance. And how far can you go when you're so marked, when you have these marks on you and these traumas and all that. And that project, I was reenacting some of the images, the poses of these women and the images. But I ended up realizing that what was happening is that this body is getting reinserted in the history of Lebanon, from which a woman has been disappeared. So I played a lot with this appearance and disappearance. And you know, there's this other project a long time ago I worked on at school, which was about the Ashura, because I grew up Shiite Muslim. And for the Shiites, their whole ideology is based on a trauma that they retell. They narrate the story of being assassinated by their family, more or less, the other Muslims who became the Sunni when there was a schism. And that they were literally stabbed in the back. And they recall this every year. They're chanting, or I don't know how to call it in English, but not even in Arabic, actually. But then the religious man, a sheik, will retell the story, and you'll see all the men crying. Like men you don't ever see crying. On this day, they're all crying. And then there's marching on the streets where they all beat their hands to their hearts like in one rhythm. And I remember at the time I was having like these, my daughter was so young, and maybe a year and a half, or two, that's like two, at the beginning of my degree. And then I knew I had some hip impingement. I was working with a physiotherapist, like, minor, minor, like misalignment. So when I walk, I knew, like, I would probably go onto one side more. But it was, nobody could notice it, you know, it was so minor. But my daughter was walking, like, exaggerating, almost exaggerating my symptom. And I was like, wow, if she sees this, what else does she see? And what am I passing on to her? But of course, you know my abstract mind was taking things, it's always taking things to an extreme in my imagination. So I was rehearsing alone, just doing some movement in the studio, and I started beating my hand to my heart. I was like, what is this? This is familiar. Like, what is this movement? And then I remember the Ashura processions. I was like, wow, if a movement, a gesture, gets stuck in the body like that. Like, I haven't done the gesture myself, but I just witnessed it. And just imagining it, visualizing it, I can hear the sound when I was on the balcony and they were all marching, mostly it's a Hezbollah scout or some of the young people in their political party. And I was like, am I passing something that is in my body to my daughter as well, that I don't talk about. And is it my role to tell her about why the Shiites mourn every year. I'm an atheist, but then do I tell her so she can understand what history she comes from and what's in my own body, as a like need to resist. Because the Shiites whole raison d'etre is that of fighting injustice. That's why you can easily link back, you know, why Hezbollah can mobilize so many people. And, yeah, I made this project to exercise the hand on the heart gesture and just repeating the gesture, and made a film. And I was thinking about, if there are coordinates sometimes and parameters for when the trauma enters, then what are they? What are the parameters for the trauma to leave? And I was imagining like an angle at which the hand goes on the heart. And just made some drawing with some geometric angles and stuff. But I, every time I create a project, some healing happens afterwards that I don't know how it happens, but I feel healed from things that usually would trigger me, and then they don't. And suddenly I'm free from things. And that's I guess, that's why I can't stop making art.
Am Johal 25:05
You mentioned Judith Butler and the sort of body coming into appearance, the kind of politics of being in public space. When we were talking earlier, before the interview, a few days ago, you had mentioned something from Maggie Nelson around exhaustion. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to these notions of exhaustion that are built into some of your works.
Ghinwa Yassine 25:29
Yeah, I do remember reading something like, we care so much that you can't care anymore, or something like that. Or at least, that's how I relate to it, especially since the events— The recent events on Gaza. When they started happening... And I had been shielding myself from the news for a long time, but this time, it was impossible to shield myself. It was like a moral, you know, responsibility. But at the same time, I was triggered. I lived a war with Israel, 33 days stuck in the house and listening, hearing bombings and stuff. Well, main— So many attacks, like, ever since I was born, and I was very triggered. But at the same time, we were doing the work with Palestinian friends, with their Arabs, with non Arabs, just organized screenings. Try to find, you know, like, try to raise awareness, try to get people to fundraise or to donate, and fundraising basically. And at the same time, it's like this is not my job to do now. I need to be healing. I need to be just attending to my trigger now, because at the same time, I'm feeling depressed and almost debilitated, but I have this urgency to support. And it felt like it doesn't make any sense. And that's when I was reading like about that chapter in On Freedom, that mentions that caring so much that you've been caring for so long, you know that at some point, yeah, it's hard to keep caring, and there's like this kindness to oneself that it's okay. I had to work with all this happening. You still have to go and pay a counselor to deal with this so you can continue fighting, you know. And I was basically asking her to give me permission to rest, you know, it's so crazy, and I had to work through this idea of, like, you can't always be in resistance and fighting. And I was lucky that I had to get distracted because I had a show in Montreal, and I had to travel, I had to prepare for it. But as soon as it was over, I came straight into, like, organizing. And yeah, part of the questions in my last project there about freedom, and is freedom the right to live a life free of fighting, or is it the freedom to fight? And I was just thinking about this dichotomy a lot, because sometimes I hate that I've inherited the need to resist or the need to fight injustice. Yeah.
Am Johal 28:01
Howard Caygill, in his book On Resistance, talks a little bit about this concept of the capacity to resist, but I guess, suppose what comes up in it also the kind of the burden to resist, and what that does to the body. And all the kind of implications that follow. I'm wondering if we could speak maybe a little bit to some of your artworks, where you take up these questions in ways, and I guess maybe, before I go there— This question of producing work that emanates from your own background, your own history, from a place. But also in the way that art circulates from, you know, a place like Vancouver, to the way it plays back to where you're from. Something happens in the translation and the movement of these ideas. I'm wondering, from your perspective as the artist making the work, how that comes back to you, how like the kinds of things that you go through as the work circulates and gets interpreted to various registered, either through the field of contemporary art or through people with the lived experience of conflict and other places. And how that reception feels to you.
Ghinwa Yassine 29:12
I feel like, as I was saying, like it's an urgency, I have no choice but to include my life, because it's not an individual thing. It's, I somehow— an individual story somehow represents a whole social realm. I'm just an example. Sometimes even like, I don't mind mixing my story with something else. Turn it into a different story, or a bigger story, more relevant story. So to get out of the personal personal, and to be able to include more people without necessarily claiming to represent them. That's a part that has been a challenge for me. When I did the performance, How Far Can a Marked Body Go? It ended up as this very long voiceover, which was a story about how women in Lebanon have been disappeared from the history books. And I knew that there was a challenge to portray the woman as a, you know, weak, struggling within patriarchal systems, in a place that can co opt that, and again, that could feed into Islamophobia or Arab racism and all these things. And, yeah, if I was living in Lebanon, maybe I would be creating different things as well. So I think the context of where I am, and I think maybe that is, you know, a lot of artists can relate to that. That where you're at dictates almost what you end up doing, making in your art. So in the beginning of the performance, How Far Can a Marked Body Go? I started with like, almost like a little disclaimer, kind of urging people to listen from a distance, to not listen with their usual, you know, Western gaze, or whatever gaze. It's something that we always, I guess, women from say patriarchal places, they would say that, you know, we're healing. We don't need this pity, or we don't need that our process gets dictated. But what by, what either colonizing countries or Western politics or whatever that is, the other, that others think that that's the way to solve our problems. Like I think any solution should come from the people involved. And so, yeah, I felt the responsibility to both say that I'm talking about these women who protested, but I did not protest, so I'm telling a story about them that does not include me. So just to clarify my positionality. And I'm always clarifying that if I'm talking about things that happened to Lebanon, I'm talking as a person who witnessed them from a distance, and that really affects the work. When you witness things from a distance. In different ways. I wouldn't be able to say exactly how it affects the work, you know?
Am Johal 32:05
I, through the help of the Below the Radar research department, I was able to watch your work, Ironing Board. Wondering if you could speak a little bit to that one.
Ghinwa Yassine 32:16
Yeah. You know, every now and then I'll allow myself to do something for fun. And it's very liberating. I think it's very important to do that. But also fun for me is like, means that I'm not looking for, like, a fun, you know, playful thing, as much as I'm allowing my intuition to guide me without going into academic mode and research mode, because mostly I'm research based. And so with Ironing Board, I just knew that I needed to iron on the beach, and I didn't know what the story was going to be about. And before, I had just come from a little trip to Montreal, and I woke up in this Airbnb alone, and that was rare at the time, to be away from my daughter and my ex husband and I have a time, have the time to be alone. And recently moved very far from Lebanon, because I think distance, and how much distance is really, it works strangely, because it's like, you know, almost how deep you go into your subconscious is relative to how far you go from home. And as if they kind of feed into each other, the further I go, the more things come out from the deep, deep, deep. Anyway, I woke up in Montreal, and then I started writing this poem in Arabic, and I don't usually write in Arabic. And the poem was really heavy. I was like, whoa. It's always about gender. And as if, you know, like, my baby self woke up somehow and said, by the way, I was, I always knew I was bisexual, and you'd never allowed me to, you know, like. And like was angry at my mom. The poem was really angry at my mom, and I wrote it, and then when I filmed the ironing, I tried that poem on it, and I also— I was playing with a combination of text and image, so I wanted to try different texts on the video. And I also just started writing intuitively. And what came out was a really long story, and it explained to me why I had this intuition to iron. So I grew up, and my dad, he was from a very poor family, and his parents would sell vegetables and fruits. And after school, he would go to this, like, kiosk and help his— my grandpa. I remember my grandpa putting us on this huge scale where he would also sell coal and just like, weigh us. And that would be my favorite game. But my dad hated that. He hated like, he was that black sheep, and he refused to just do that. He had ambitions, and he loved fashion. So he started a fashion factory. And every time there would be a war, he would have to sell some of the sewing machines, or this or that, and then he'll have one, or you have 10, and then he grew it a lot. And then, 2006, the whole factory fell to the ground, the whole building, and he started it again. So. But I grew up with colors and irons and everything, and we had a really good, like I would hear my dad saying, oh, this man is amazing. He has the perfect ironing hands. If only his work ethics were better. And I would hear that. And then the gender dynamics too. My dad and mom would fight over things, like their relationship was very volatile. He'd see like a crease in his shirt, he'd be like, that's bad. And then I wanted to be the pacifier, so I somehow became excellent at ironing. And then, like, maybe to save some drama at home. And I would, I started ironing his shirts at some point, and I would do it. I would iron all my sister's school outfits and stuff. Anyway, that, I wrote a story about that, but I wrote a story— That story was about the crease and me and the crease, and this kind of like mirror telling you like, this fight with perfectionism, and it's related to also allowing oneself to draw imperfectly and to not be like this. This whole ironing became a metaphor for being restricted by all these norms and the history and all that. Yeah.
Am Johal 36:22
I'll just mention a couple more projects, but feel free to touch on the ones that you'd like to. The yoga mat, prayer rug, coffee cup, coffee pot. You're very prolific. There's a lot of projects, but I'll come to the more recent ones later, but some of the older ones that...
Ghinwa Yassine 36:26
Yeah, these last two were part of the installation in the Netherlands, Home Suspended. And I was tracing the memory. That was like my first, say, instinct as an artist, to talk about displacement. I think that's almost a common thing. Diasporic artists talking about displacement. And I was witnessing myself rolling the yoga mat, becoming like this, you know, almost religious yogi, because I would not skip a day or something like that. And I again, the gesture is such a like portal to memories. And I would remember rolling the prayer rug as well, because I was... Sometimes I prayed. I wanted to pray. I went through this religious phase when I was maybe 15, but sometimes I was told, like, go pray. Until, yeah, until, like, things completely changed for me, and I stopped praying completely. But I remember, like, I was like, am I rolling the yoga mat like I'm rolling a prayer rug? What is the difference? I'm like, my mom turned her head to the right and to the left when she ends. And in yoga, you do that for stretching and all, like all the asanas. And I just thought I'd create a loop between these movements, because I think the underlying thing in my whole work is that I have a strong reaction to ideology. It just doesn't sit well with me. So anything that turns dogmatic, I try to challenge. But at the same time, I know that once you grow up in a place where there's ritual, dogma, perfectionism and like that's specific to my home, not just my culture. And like, discipline. It's really hard to undo these things. So even as an atheist or as an artist, I still have similar relationships with discipline as I would have, maybe if I was a religious Muslim, you know. They just, like, just go in different directions. I think that's like my personal quest, me deconstructing these tendencies, but an artist's ideology.
Am Johal 38:50
You'd mentioned some of these other projects, but I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more to them. The How Far Can a Marked Body Go? And When You Pour Something, It Carries the Memory of its Mold.
Ghinwa Yassine 39:02
Yeah, How Far Can a Marked Body Go? was mostly about these protest images and the bodies of women. When I worked on this project, that's when I thought, okay, I'll take it far. Not just thinking about icons and image and the kick queen, but also now it's time to interview the protesters. And I spoke to a few of them, and I wanted to still almost validate my instinct about that that was an iconic moment and that had an impact, and that it was being forgotten. And that was all validated by what they were saying. And now, when I tell people, Lebanese women about this, they're like, oh yeah, that woman who kicked the guy, you know, like they have to scratch their brains. And I asked them about, first of all, what happened in their bodies throughout the whole process, and also what role women played on the streets. And they really elucidated a lot of things that I had no idea about. For example, that women played important roles in terms of organizing what gets chanted based on what event was going to happen. Writing all these signs and also mobilizing more people. Having meetings to talk about visions for improvement for the government, you know, not just, like writing and being involved in smashing things and whatever. But sometimes, if they think it's important to be violent, they would go and start destroying. When it's like, there were strategic moments. The women, some of the women I interviewed, were part of something called the front line, and so they would right away hear, like, okay, okay, we need women. We need women. And they would go and make a line between the police and the protesters, because till then, the police would not hit a woman. But at some point that changed. And so there was no difference, women or men. They were all getting beaten. And they told me that this was in the history of Lebanese protests, the most violent. And some woman who was in the Communist Party who protested since, like, the 80s or 90s, she's like, this one you did not know if you were going to go home alive, because they wanted us out of the street. Because some of the politicians' sons, who were obviously against the protest— the politicians, not their sons. The sons would come out of curiosity, and they would see that there was a language, and like a discourse that was on the street that was so inclusive, especially by the women, because they were cooking, they were playing, like mother roles, even to really young kids who were just going there to create, you know, violence and destroy and all that. And they would just talk to them. One of the protesters told me there used to be a car that would bring, like a few men that would bring pills, and they would just want to give them to the young protesters, so there would be more violence. And that would harm the reputation of the protesters in general. And they would get high, and they would want to start, so the kids would get high and want to start to destroy more. And she thought, but these kids love music. She realized, what if I bring my friend who was coming from Berlin to—who was a percussionist to give a workshop? And that happened, and then there was, like a totally different mood. These kids were actually enjoying the workshop. And at some point, the one kid who was the most aggressive before, when he saw that there was some like problems happening, and he usually would go and want to be engaged. He was like, oh, I just want to make music. And then they told them, because there's a huge class difference between these groups. A lot of women come from Druze and Christian backgrounds. They don't wear the veil. They're more progressive, let's say. They don't mind sleeping in the tent with other men. And then there were these boys who come from villages, very close minded, very, you know, traditional. And they thought they would never be able to talk to these women. And they come and they're like, oh my gosh. Like, we never thought we could talk to you. They thought that there was no way. Actually, they also misunderstood these women there. And so what does— what's happening on the ground was very transformative, and the effects of it are everlasting. Even some of the chants got chanted again years after, maybe two years after by some girls in Tripoli, when they were protesting against a teacher in a school who was a sexual predator. They repeat the chants that started on the street in the protests. So anyway, that's a long story, but these women also talked about the failure of it all, and how, after all this happened, they even, like one of them told me, I touch my body and I don't feel it. Like that level of adrenaline that was there and that there was like a cause they were fighting for. And then the dream just almost, you know, failing. She was still recovering from it a year later.
Am Johal 44:19
Wondering if you could speak a little bit to the project, When You Pour Something, It Carries the Memory of its Mold?
Ghinwa Yassine 44:25
Yeah. So after all this journey of focusing on protests, focusing on my role and the history, women's role, and all that, I started to think about freedom. Like for me, it made sense that freedom is the freedom to appear, no matter who you are, how you are, in your truth safely in the world. To appear even, physically, to occupy space. And then I thought about, what are the limits of freedom? What are these rights that we might ask for, that we have never asked for? What is the future? What is freedom in the future? Is it that we do ask for things that we've never thought about? Like, do we say I want the right to kill? Or do we go back in cycles of history, like abortion in the States. Or like in Saudi Arabia, before they used to... women were free, and then they weren't, and then they are again. So I wanted to think about these questions after that. At the time, I was starting to read more about, you know, from Nelson and Butler and a few more, and James. Baldwin. And this is again, a time where I was like, I'm going to be experimental in this project. The heavy theory from, about freedom wasn't inspiring me yet. Something was not there yet. And I was thinking about secret codes, and every time in history where people had to write something as a secret. And I was thinking, should I make something that's like using invisible ink and things like that. So at the time, the project was called Invisible Ink, and that's when I did a fellowship with SFU, and we did, like, very experimental performance with some people from the community, artists. And it was more like embodied experiments around freedom, collective. And I then again, as usual, go to the writing board. I start writing. I don't think when I write. And I started writing this long manifesto, you will be free, when you will be free, when you will be free, when... And then I will just continue the sentence. And I thought, I'll just do it forever. But then obviously, the things that were happening in Palestine were affecting me a lot, and the realization that life, an individual's life's worth, is so random and so different depending on, yeah, very random factors. Where you're born, you don't decide what your worth is. I remember when we used to have wars with Israel, for every soldier, we would free Israeli soldiers, hostages, they would like free hundreds of Lebanese. That's almost the balance of value of life. And I started writing more little blurbs about things that have to do with identity as well. I didn't expect to do that because I was moving away from, like, more and more away from identity. Well, I can't say that. I don't think I could say that. But that was maybe my hope. But eventually again, I went back into this, like, I think the randomness of it all and the fact that their freedom is so elusive. So when I was working on this text, there was a part that came out was like, it's worse than ever before. You were born in Arab. You were still an Arab. It's not going to change. You are proud, but scared. Because I was starting to feel scared with all the polarization in North American politics as an Arab here. And then I wrote some more and some more. And then in the end, I was like, so shake that Arab hip of yours, because all you have left is dancing, and that's my resistance. I just dance. I stopped thinking about everything, and I just dance. And I thought, ooh what if I create this belly dancer character, because I've been working on imbuing my work with some humor. Even, How Far Can a Marked Body Go? I'm currently working on a parody of it, like completely switching, like flipping it over its head. And I created this character. I thought maybe the costumes are made of paper, since we're all like in the secret codes and my writing idea. I created with the help of Natasha Dennison, who's a costume designer and dancer, also went to SFU, some paper costumes. Like the system, the belly dancer and religion. Their performance. I made three short films, two performative films, and they're just like, moving very minimally. I wanted the belly dancer to only be able to move her hip, because that's the signature aspect of belly dancing. But not, none of them is dancing dancing. Because I'm not a dancer, and I don't want to dance in my project, but I do move so. And it somehow became a language itself, the gestures isolated and just repetition, repetition. Yeah.
Am Johal 49:34
Wondering if you could speak to, you know, what you're working on now or in the near future?
Ghinwa Yassine 49:40
Yeah. So now, actually, When You Pour Something, is also these huge resin sculptures. So it's three films and four sculptures, and all the text that I wrote, I hid in the sculptures, and I made them a little too blurry for you to read. So they're resin and they're translucent, and you have to go close to read them. And there was even a part about art, about like, even if you don't feel like you fit your politicized body anymore, you have no choice. Something like, resist their categories, and you become a ghost. And that text, I was— it just opened in Montreal early this month, and some folks came. Two young artists, I believe they're siblings, Filipinas, and they came like, kind of crying. And that's the part that moved them the most, about struggling to make art in a place that cannot see you but as a politicized body. I think, for when I'm making art, I'm never thinking about how people would relate, but then I end up being surprised, because the people who relate are not just the Arab women or Lebanese women or queer women, it's a lot of different people. And like another, Amanda, who's of African heritage came to Montreal, like I just met her then at the exhibition, and she told me it was so liberating to see a work that does not fit into one discipline. And again, I'm not really like planning this, but I love how the work always, the meaning of it comes after the audience encounters it, and they tell you, like, different people tell me things. I'm like, oh, I should start using that, you know. But, yeah, I'm right now remaking How Far Can a Marked Body Go? I'm just, I hired Aryo Khakpour, and he's an amazing artist here, and I just felt like the type of humor he displays, although I haven't worked with him before, I think that's what I need to turn my performance into something different. I want to be able to resist my own resistance like to resist the need for meaning, for seriousness, for I want to see if this time play can be an act of resistance, and what would I do with this performance that's super heavy. So we've been like, taking one sentence and just playing and moving and like, and I'll see where it goes. I should perform it at the end of this year, and I started a new project called Come Eat From my Land. I'm struggling to start because it's supposed to be filmed in June in Lebanon. And my parents' village where I would go a lot growing up and I still, whenever I visit, we go to the village as well. And this is like my ancestral village, where I would see my grandpa tilling the soil and planting and watering. And I kept dreaming, having the same dream last year, of him around the same tree. And for some reason, you know, you have some images that come to you from childhood. One of them for me is just like, there's a really tall wall near the stairs that go take you up to the rooftop in my grandpa's old village. And where his like fork and shovel, they're all like, suspended or hung. And for some reason, that image keeps coming to my mind. And last month, last summer, my dad gave me and my sisters a piece of land, and I went to sign the papers. And at the time, I knew I wanted the land just because it connects me to my grandpa, and I somehow still feel so connected to him. He died in a car accident. He died too young, and I feel like there's no closure there. And I wanted to create a work about what it means to own the land. So Come Eat From My Land. I would take my friend who's American, who's a videographer, and basically be like, come eat from my land, come feel what I feel when I take a fruit off of the tree, my parent's land, and I eat it, and it feels like nothing else anywhere. And my village got bombed in February, so I won't be able to go. It's not safe now, and it's the first time I think that I've ever seen, like, the name of my village in The Guardian or something. It was really weird. But I want to go, probably in August, hopefully the things will change by then. But I want to interview the tobacco growers, because my village, or basically the people there are indigenous to the village, are tobacco growers. And just document the process and talk to different people and film my grandpa's old place and see what story comes out of that.
Am Johal 54:32
There's a lot of grad students that listen to this podcast, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you was just around, what are you struggling with right now as an artist? Whether it's thinking or your practice, the kinds of things that are coming up for you.
Ghinwa Yassine 54:49
It's funny, because I feel like I make art while fitting a capitalistic system. I have to create three projects at the time to survive, you know, and I just want a year of being able to do research and read and take time to come up with ideas and not have to produce so much. At the same time, I wonder if I will feel happier, because I feel very happy producing as well. But I do think I struggle with how much my brain needs to divide itself into different directions. Like days I have to do a lot of admin, like, a lot of accounting, you know. A lot of grant writing and things like that. And the part that I want to create and how to reconcile these. So I've come to some kind of good rhythm where the days where I have admin are just admin days, that I don't mix the two. Because the brain is going in a place that is really more cognitive. And I like to produce art when I'm more in a meditative state. Yeah,before really waking up, you know? I guess that's a struggle. And another struggle is that my art is still not really understood here. And it doesn't get necessarily the exposure it deserves. I'm not like, saying it as like, oh, I think my art deserves more. But I think like for me at least, to be able to continue, I need the art to be in conversation with more people. I need the work to be seen by more people so I could continue, so I can get the feedback, so I can also know that I can put that project in a drawer somewhere, and not have to think, oh, but it only been exhibited once. Can I still, you know, send proposals. I think, yeah, opportunities like that, and the fact that I create big, large scale stuff and shipping as a new thing for me like, oh, now I need to deal with shipping and to strategize. I need a bigger studio...
Am Johal 56:47
Storage.
Ghinwa Yassine 56:48
Storage. What else am I going to rent?
Am Johal 56:52
Anything you'd like to add, Ghinwa?
Ghinwa Yassine 56:55
No, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. I hope people can relate to the work that I do.
Am Johal 57:01
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar,
Ghinwa Yassine 57:05
Of course, thank you.
Kathy Feng 57:11
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Ghinwa Yassine. You can learn more about Ghinwa’s work in the show notes below. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.