Pawiand and The Past
This week with Paiwand we were fortunate to have Sami around the whole time, he is such a supportive person and also provides translation which I need as my very basic farsi is limited in explaining conceptual ideas and emotional experiences.
The approach to the object wrapping was very different this time compared to An-nisa. Since I am intensely aware of how little these boys possess on the material level – everything having been either taken away from them or left behind in Afghanistan – I couldn’t apply the same request as with An-nisa. It took most of the session to reach the wrapping of one object each and the way I did this was to ask them to recall an object from home that was meaningful to them and to write it on paper. Then we wrapped the paper and it stands as a proxy – or is it as real as the original thing ? There’s a philosophical discussion to be had on that one….Getting them to see the relevance of this only worked after giving examples myself and after Javad had raced over to a cupboard and pulled out a series of posters of Afghanistan from the 70’s – technicolour, including an intact Kabul and an undamaged Bamiyan Buddha statue.
Showing these seemed to animate them and they were full of explanations about the images which created enough of a sense of connection with the past to enable an object to be chosen and written. A red racing pigeon, a signet ring given as a gift and lost before leaving home, and a wristband given by a best friend at college in Afghanistan and also lost.
I have a strong feeling that my part in this collaboration re these objects for this particular group , may be to recreate these objects, wrapped. I also still have the UNHCR report ‘Trees only move in the wind’ very much in mind to use in the space. Especially after a conversation with one of the boys who told me that he had spent eight months travelling through eight different countries to get here. Out of a small group travelling together, he was the only one to reach the UK. He had no idea what had happened to the others.
I have consciously chosen not to ask them lots of questions about their journey here and why’s and how’s of everything. I could see they are weary of being questioned , by the many systems they have to interact with and it’s not my role to tell their story in this way but to presence rather than represent. In the report I mention, there are a list of over 100 recommended questions for the interviews and I know that they have been asked many of these repeatedly in different contexts. Keeping to a simple description of an object took a long time but once they had wrapped them – in deep red and green – it genuinely felt like a breakthrough, for them and us. I hope that they will be here to come and see what I actually make with all this, that remains unknown.
