MishMish is Apricot in Arabic

and processss

I am very big on process. That is where the juice is. I love the research and time and ritual it takes to make something. For me, time spent is the largest labour of love. Things done quickly by me are almost always for capitalism (aka survival). Things done slowly by me are done for love. It is why I take so long when making a piece for my creative practice. I want it to never end and in a way it never does.

I wrote the line embroidered on this cloth after Fariha Róisín gave us a prompt in class. I think the prompt was, what is your relationship with the earth? This was back in September of last year. A few weeks before the world woke up to what happens to Indigenous peoples when they practice landback methods and defend themselves.

Since writing this line which is a line from a larger piece of writing the work has been recited in Miami Art Week last year (where I sobbed on stage in front of strangers as the night before the reading when poet Refaat Alareer was assassinated), it has been a part of Tamika Abaka-Wood’s powerful dial-an-ancestor project which has taken both audio and visual forms and lastly it was shown partially incomplete as a part of the Art of Resistance showcase co-curated by my dear Palestinian/Egyptian sister, Nouri.

And now it is finally where I imagined it all along, on a szmata that I hand-dyed with Cesar in his mother’s house and with a pile of apricot sculptures I made, some inscribed by my shaky hands in Arabic, Polish, and English.

This work is called مش مش. It is dedicated to my four grandparents, who I have had the privilege of knowing and learning from. Three of them are still with us today الحمد لله .