It’s not goodbyes but reminiscences that are the subject of conceptual artist Sara Badr Schmidt’s exhibition at the Agial gallery, “We left home…but what is home”.
The artist presents a wide variety of multimedia works: drawings, videos, texts, woven works, bronze sculptures and photographs illustrate themes linked not only to childhood memory and place, but also to the repercussions of war and the question of attachment to place and the ruptures caused by alienation, profoundly questioning the relationship between existence and identity, between attachment and uprooting. With the power of simplicity in the conceptualisation of her ideas and the intimacy with which she touches the depths of the heart, the artist examines and evokes facts drawn from her personal experiences, stories, details and abandoned objects that now exist only in the fog of memory, in its bottomless pit or still waters.
The artist explains: “This project deals with the violence of a war suffered in childhood and its repercussions on the construction of a being. The resulting trauma is repressed because children always give adults the impression that they are adapting. Because of the war in Lebanon and my origins, I have been constantly on the move between East and West. This project is an attempt to convey the emotion of being constantly away from your environment, your friends, your home, of having fear written deep down in your being. You end up not knowing where you belong, while at the same time trying to fit in, to be accepted in a new place.”
The exhibition is autobiographical in terms of confessions and revelations, and its beauty lies in its narrative. It explores autobiographical themes to raise thornier questions about the concepts of identity and belonging, using various media and artistic materials alongside literary and poetic texts written by the artist in three languages, the languages of the countries in which she has lived, transcribed using carbon paper so that the words appear as a ‘trace’, these carbon sheets were used by her father, a Lebanese doctor, for his prescriptions. Her artistic vocabulary also makes use of weaving techniques and applied arts.
In one of her poems, Sara Badr Schmidt writes: “Threads are woven around me, protective canvas, coloured canvas. Wool threads, mormor (Swedish for grandmother), clinking needles. Embroidery threads, teta (grandmother in Lebanese), fireworks in an old metal box.
The child remembers, “An intimate place is the childhood home where we are born, where our imagination is formed, and which is the shadow of the world of the soul”, as analysed by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who distinguished two levels of reading attached to the place: the architecture of the place, i.e. its geometric and geographic dimensions, because it manifests itself as a real geometric entity, and the poetics of the place, the childhood home, which centres existence within a boundary that offers protection. The two levels, architectural and poetic, are evident in Sara Badr Schmidt’s exhibition, in which two works represent the two geometric plans of the two houses that marked her childhood: one in Achrafieh, east of Beirut, and the other on a peninsula in the Stockholm archipelago, both plans sharing the shape of a square; the two drawings are accompanied by GPS position codes. The artist has also created a simplified model of two roofless squares, a personal interpretation of his two houses separated by a glass partition that simulates the sky, with a pane of glass on the Lebanese side pierced by the impact of a bullet, a reminder of the war.
“In Beirut, the whole flat was flooded with light, thanks to the high ceilings and glass doors. A Persian carpet covered the living room floor… The sky was the link that took us from one end of the world to the other. In Dalarö, Sweden, the house was located by the sea on a peninsula, its garden jutting out into the sea. It was designed in osmosis with the landscape outside, made up of rocks, sky, sea, trees and the cry of seagulls. These two places are pillars with deep points of interconnection whose foundations emerged on a specific soil.”
Each work has a story: The exhibition by Sara Badr Schmidt (Lebanese-Swedish, living and working in Paris) starts from the idea of travel and attachment to a place, highlighting the family home in Beirut, an old house listed as “heritage”, which was sold by the heirs and no longer exists, and the second house where the artist spent all her summer holidays on a peninsula in Sweden near Stockholm, which was also sold and then destroyed by the buyer, both in the same year.
This destruction raised many questions for the artist about the nature of his war-torn life between Beirut, Sweden and France, and triggered memories of a childhood spent to the sound of sniper bullets and cannon fire, accompanied by displacement, uprooting and the challenges of life in the diaspora.
In a text, the artist recounts: “I lived to the rhythm of war. I filled this word with the sound of cannons, the taste of fear, images of desolation, the smell of flight, the feeling of abandonment. The sound of war is also the sound of silence, enveloping its musty taste. The colours of life defy the darkness of war, revealing its absurdity.”
The first drawing to emerge spontaneously was that of a child remembering, through which the artist recounts her dislocation. She uses these innate drawings to weave her childhood stories into a series of tapestries that are soft to the touch, delicate, layering gradations (in wool, cashmere and silk – made in a weaving workshop in Nepal), depicting scenes of a child lost in the sunny pink fields of his memories. Each painting has a story, and each story is accompanied by a text.
In a text entitled We left home 1, she says: “A table with four legs. Usually we sit around it, but today we have to sit under it; usually a table serves as a support, today it serves as a shelter, for want of a better word, a psychological shelter more than a real one, to cover heads bewildered by the novelty of war and the need to protect themselves. It doesn’t usually rain in Beirut in April, but today it’s a different kind of rain, more solid, more metallic, a rain of shells under a blue sky darkened by war. This table is the one in my uncle’s dining room, at which the little seven-year-old girl that I am on 13 April 1975 has sat several times for lunch. Today the reality is quite different, seen from underneath the table, the dark wood of its top, the sombre faces of the adults trying to mask their dismay with serious airs. Silence interspersed with the shrill then muffled sound of balls, and the drumming sound of a heart beating fast, very fast, begging for the reassuring smiles of the adults.”
In another text entitled “We Left Home 5”, she says: “You wake up and you don’t know whether you want to hear the sound of the bombs or not, that sound that makes you want to be alone.
bombs or not, that sound that means no school but also war. Quiet, on the other hand, means ‘we’re going to school’. Some days the little voice that says ‘if only there could be a few sounds of bombs’, so that we don’t go to school, becomes louder.”
In the foreground of the exhibition is an installation consisting of a painting of the cherry blossom tree that marked her childhood and a carpet on the floor that represents a mirror reflection of the image of the tree on the surface of memory, appearing as a large field of pink blossom colours mixed with the blue of the sky and the colours of nature. This cherry tree was in the playground of the school in France where she had landed at the start of the war in Lebanon. At the mention of the house, Sara Badr Schmidt evokes the title of Milan Kundera’s novel “L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être”, changing its title to “L’insoutenable non-légèreté de l’être”, to symbolically represent this house by the snail carrying its house on its back, in a series of bronze sculptures of six snails, one of which has no house, a reference to the journey. This work is a realistic recreation of the years spent playing in the garden of the family home in Sweden: “Holidays. Rain or shine, but always an unshakeable peace punctuated by visits from the squirrels. To ward off boredom, I organise snail races, which I collect on rainy days and number on my back, keeping an eye on them during those two months of summer that stretch on indefinitely every year.”
The exhibition, more than two years in the making, is a “search for lost time” (a title borrowed from Marcel Proust’s novel), with all its details, experiences, events and diaries “through the eyes of a visionary artist”, as gallery owner Saleh Barakat describes it – place, belonging and identity observed, analysed and reinterpreted in every detail. Place, belonging and identity in all their complexity become intimate and individual, while evoking broader social and cultural issues, raising many questions about the tragedy of displacement caused by conflict, violence, war and natural disaster. In her message to societies at war and in conflict on earth, artist Sara Badr Schmidt invites them to raise their eyes to the sky, where the dream is limitless. As for the homeland, it resides within us, for even if we leave it, it does not leave us.