#zoepaterniani

THE SEA IS NOT DEAD Zoe Paterniani

I’ve been welcomed to Jordan more than a hundred times.

But being welcomed when you are far from your place is never enough to calm homesickness and the perception of being different from the surroundings.

On the way from Queen Alia airport to Darat al Funun, I saw thousands of electoral campaign posters. I was overwhelmed by the complexity of social and visual landscapes of the city and I felt the need to explore it. Amman is many cities altogether, not neatly juxtaposed, they are squeezed, mashed into each other, so that you can barely understand where one ends and another one begins. These posters have been my fil rouge as I was trying to orient myself and find some reference points. They seemed to be the only common thread between areas as different as Abdoun and Ain Albasha. For the first twenty days, I followed these threads as an attempt to detangle both the political and geographical complexity of Amman.

During my residency at Darat al Funun, I spoke to many young artists and students. Their work to me is new and interesting and different from what I have seen before. I soon realized that this city, and the country as a whole is mainly inhabited by refugees, foreigners and expats. Even the people who were born here hardly consider themselves completely Jordanian. Each ethnic group has its own traditions, yet everyone is basically integrated with the others.

I figured that taxi drivers are welcoming you every time because they have been welcomed too, not a long time ago. It became clear to me that homesickness in Jordan doesn’t make you different from others, it is in fact the feeling that made possible this huge mixture of cultures and the endless contradiction in landscape in which they peacefully coexist while preserving their differences.

That’s how I started my research on the Dead Sea: it reminded me of my sea-side hometown in Italy, the sunset is amazing there, peaceful and chilled. As I was standing in front of this huge mass of water I felt the nostalgia knocking again, this time with a different intensity: seeing the the other side is beautiful and painful at the same time, the sea works as both a disjunctive and a connective element, it is not dead to me because the water is moving and touching both sides in an endless cycle. I realized that I can always go back home, while someone else can’t.

Now that I am back in Italy I’m still trying to find a shape for my work in Jordan and to process how this residency experience changed my point of view on photography, society and artistic practice in general.

I’m somehow sure that I’ll be back there soon.