Quilting the Memoir is a time-based media art installation comprised of a series of digital quilts. Each digital quilt is composed of images, photographs and photographed objects, that have been stitched together, creating abstract impressions of memory and the stories they tell.
Inspired by different quilting traditions and cultures, including the Egyptian Khayamiya, the digital quilt brings together life stories that draw from experienced and inherited childhood memories, family photographs, and photographed objects. The digital quilt is a transformative media artefact that shifts concepts of memory and the archive, from a fixed entities, into lived experiential collective spaces.
Quilting the Memoir draws on life stories, memoirs and academic research that explore the cultural imaginaries of Egyptian Jewry.
Golden circles, Global Diaspora is one of a series of Digital Quilts created for the series Quilting the Memoir. The quilt evokes the complicated relationship to Egypt experienced by a global Egyptian Jewish diaspora. On the one hand “Om al Donya” (Mother Earth) is a national identity that Egyptian Jews identify with. On the other hand, there is an undeniable and seemingly unresolvable schism, between Jews and Arabs, that has evolved and intensified historically. A more thoughtful and inclusive history might teach us otherwise.
Main Image - Digital file / Overview 1 - Video Wall projection / Other view 2 - Screen projection
