Adrian Paci, Rasha
Screening
Out of Competition
The video “Rasha” grew out of Adrian Paci’s encounter with a Palestinian woman who had recently arrived in Rome from Syria thanks to humanitarian corridors. “Rasha“ is filmed as she tells her story but the images we see in the video, however, are the moments in between sentences when the woman falls silent, waiting for her words to be translated. And so we see her listening to her own story, reinterpreted. In these intervals of silence, her posture, her gestures, and the alternating expressions of her face convey not only the strain of the story, but the power of the experience she has lived through, an experience that despite all efforts to express the core of it, cannot be entirely summed up in words. As the artist points out, between the verbal narrative and the bodily one, “between the silent face and the voice speaking Arabic, a gap emerges”: Rasha becomes “the protagonist not only of her story and of its telling, but also of its hearing.” This work is “a reflection on the traces that an experience leaves on our bodies and how the body conveys them, beyond words. The thousand facets of Rasha’s expression speak louder than her words. Words are not useless, but they are not enough. Rasha is a work about the complexity of storytelling; about how an experience becomes a story and becomes language, not just through words, but through the body.”
Courtesy the artist, kaufmann repetto, Milano e New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
