Solange Adum Abdala

My maternal ancestry comes from Beit Jala, Palestine, while my paternal family is from Zgharta, Lebanon, both from Orthodox Christian belives. My great-grandparents left their respective Arab countries, expelled by the repression of the Ottoman and British Empires, in search of a better life in ¨The Americas.¨ After years of travelling by steamship from the Middle East to the Caribbean and South America, enduring the transit process that intensified the feeling of not belonging, my family settled between Peru, Brazil, and Chile. This migratory process lasted approximately 70 years, an experience that has become a part of my family heritage. As I migrated from Peru, the country where I was born, to Vancouver, I have explored the conceptions of space and time through navigation and memory. I feel that my body has relived the experiences of my great-grandparents, grandparents, and father.

The intersdisciplinary installation Laisser-Passer [Let Pass] explores, through a personal and family narrative, the first waves of migration from the Arab community to Latin America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French term «Laisser-Passer», historically used as a «free passage» visa for migrants, appears in my family documents. The work consists of a performative video projected on the back of a 13.1 by 5.9-foot floating canvas. On this surface, I have traced an innumerable amount of speculative and expansive routes of my ancestors and my own path. The video reproduces a high-pitched noise, obtained from the recording of the empty room. This sounds activates an uncomfortable feeling of absence that hums in the brain and the heart. The distance between the projection from the floor to the canvas allows viewers to walk in front of the projector, thus casting their shadow on the video, in which my walk and my family are unified with the migratory stories of many other people. A photograph of the palm of my hand taken after completing the traces on the canvas, the documentation of a performative act in which I scrape the speculative routes onto a black wall with my knuckles, and a layout that conglomerates migratory documents, drawings and family archive photographs, are also part of the installation.

In Laisser-Passer, the physical repetition of an action alludes to an ongoing journey. The research establishes a temporal connection between family lineage, migration and a narrative that transcends time.