Fevered Lines
Mixed Media, Ink on paper, Tree Barks gathered from Enbridge Pipeline Oil Spill Sites, Poetry, 2022.
In the spring of 2022, I embarked on a transformative artistic journey during my Good Hart artist residency. My initial mission was to create a site-specific Soundscape that delved into the environmental consequences of Enbridge Pipelines on Michigan's soil, particularly the devastating spillages on Anishinaabe lands. This exploration led me from Kalamazoo to Mackinac Strait, where I collected sounds from pipeline and spillage sites and engaged with tribal members to understand the historical injustices of genocide, land displacement, and forced migration that they endured. This experience opened a profound door of reflection on my own Kurdish heritage, marked by displacement, genocide, colonization, and enduring conflicts.
At each site of past oil spills, I collected not only sounds but also dead tree bark. My mixed-media ink drawings emerged from the process of archiving these sounds, creating a cognitive cartography that reflects upon the land, water bodies, and non-human existence through a reversed anthropomorphic gaze. Each artwork is composed around the tree barks to generate a field for the contemplation of the continuous lines and my poems in Kurdish and Farsi.
Unique to the drawings, these poems offer an imagined perspective of how trees, rivers, lakes, and animals perceive the Anthropocene. In one of the poems, 'Transactional Pain,' I explore the notion that humans are uniquely adaptable to pain, framing our world in a transactional paradigm where benefits must outweigh suffering for actions to be justified. This system permeates our workspaces, industries, wars, and governance, yet we impose it on the non-human world to measure their intelligence and agency.
My work seeks to reflect on the paradoxical economy of pain, contemplating the complexity of our interactions with the nonhuman.