Jordanian-Palestinian artist Deema Shahin speaks to Marija Schranz about her project Home is Where Mum Is, which explores the concept of home as linked to a wider understanding of motherhood.
When Deema Shahin, 34, conjures up memories of her mother, her face lights up and a sense of peace clearly overcomes her.
For Shahin, an artist who works with photography and film, home is where her mother is.
“She’s in Jordan at the moment and I miss her so much,” she said.
Shahin does not have children nor does she envisage this role for herself as yet. But she is clearly intrigued by what she perceives to be the utter selflessness that mothers embody as they celebrate the joys of their family members, share in their sorrow and grief and, essentially, postpone their own dreams to ensure the fulfilment of those around them.
“My mother was a painter herself and had so many aspirations. She wanted to be a journalist, for example, but she put all her aspirations aside to raise us. Nowadays, she is queen of the world when surrounded by her grandchildren, my brother’s kids,” Shahin said.
Shahin, however, does not limit the concept of motherhood to women. In her project, Home Is Where Mum Is, which has already travelled to Barcelona in Spain and Fayoum in Egypt, she has also worked with a male couple and in Gozo, where she is currently working, she hopes to collaborate with a priest who has, for the past 20 years, worked with disabled persons.
“He goes for them and takes them out to see the world, something they would not be doing were it not for him. He truly embodies the spirit of what I understand motherhood to be.”
It is, perhaps, no surprise that Shahin has come to develop this project. She herself is rootless, having been born in Kuwait where she lived for the first eight years of her life and subsequently moving to Jordan after the second Gulf War.
As a child, she remembers obtaining special permits to visit her grandparents in Palestine. However, this then stopped when they passed away 29 years ago.
She grew up as an immigrant in Jordan, one of the 65 per cent of the population made up primarily of immigrants and refugees. This is also what attracted her to continue her project in Gozo.
“It’s such an interesting place. You look at the map and find a little island in the middle of the Mediterranean, with so many refugees dying in the surrounding sea, trying to cross to somewhere safe. This made the country very appealing to me for my project.”
For Shahin, home is not a place as she has no use for national identity. Borders fail to make much sense nowadays. Travelling widely for work, she comes across the same fears, the same hopes, the same complaints, such as increasing prices or traffic.
You look at the map and find a little island in the middle of the Mediterranean, with so many refugees dying in the surrounding sea, trying to cross to somewhere safe
For me, human beings make sense,” she asserts.
This is why home is something she equates with feeling safe and protected. For her, this is her mother and her project intends to investigate whether this is the case or not for others.
She works with individuals, filming them while following them around as they go through their daily routine, asking very few questions but repeating the questions again and again. As time passes, she explains, the answers evolve further as the subjects of her work feel more comfortable in her presence.
The people she chooses are usually a result of happenstance. In one case locally, for example, she fell and injured her arm badly and bumped into a nurse at the pharmacy where she went for medication and things evolved from there. Another subject was the co-owner at a restaurant where she went to eat.
The question naturally arose – what about those who don’t have mothers or whose relationship with their mother is troubled?
“In fact,” she replied, “Anabella, one of the participants of the Spanish leg of the project, is a case in point. She became homeless at the age of seven, the daughter of a mother who didn’t want her and who constantly told her she had wanted a son. She herself is now bi-polar and the mother of two daughters. She is fighting hard to be a good mother to them but her mental illness makes this particularly hard. Clearly, for her, home is most definitely not where her mother is.”
The discussion turned to the political scenario with Shahin concerned that certain incidents are slowly but surely eroding the space for freedom of expression to exist.
In discussing the recent killing of Jordanian author and political activist Nahed Hattar – shot dead outside a court in Amman where he was due to appear on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam – which happened the day before Shahin left for Malta, she explained that even if she did not always agree with his ideologies, his killing was a big threat to our humanity.
She had harsh words for the role of the media in the current political climate we live in, believing it has sabotaged how we see and perceive danger.
“Whether Daesh [as Isis is referred to in Arab countries] kill 1,000 people in Yemen or one person on the streets of Jordan, it’s all unacceptable,” she said.
Shahin believes education and use of language are key for the way we can come to relate to one another.
“How we analyse things, how we think of them, how we talk about them, what we teach our children – a lot of responsibility lies here,” she emphasised. “What is our value system? We need to clarify this to learn how to deal with the current reality.”
And, of course, we learn our values from home, so we are back again full circle to the focus of Shahin’s project on motherhood.
Shahin is still not sure what the end goal of her project will be, though she knows she wishes to visit other places to continue it, including Stuttgart and the refugee camps in Jordan, as well as nationalities that are not often talked about such as Yemenis, Libyans, Sudanese, Sri Lankans and Filipinos.
She wonders if, perhaps, she will be able to put together some sort of visual dictionary of dreams, of mothers, of different but similar stories lived around the world.
Deema Shahin is currently participating in an artist-in-residence programme being run in Gozo by Valletta 2018 and Spazju Kreattiv. She arrived in Malta at the end of September and will depart on November 10. Her visit is also part of the Europe Grand Central project which Valletta 2018 is collaborating on along with the Roberto Cimetta Fund. For more information on the artist, visit http://deemashahin.net .