Inner Homeland

My scope broadens when I find myself in obscure places.
At the same time I’m headed in the opposite direction, toward
an inner homeland.

Moving to a completely new city, I went on a quest for my own “homeland,” a series of experimental pieces intended to provoke a closer connection to a sought-after primary home-place.

I made a triangle form out of wood and felt, and called it “screen”.

In my animated light installation, Sun Transit, an orange orb slowly rises through a triangular sculpture.

Inside the triangle, a golden orb makes its journey, rising slowly.

These simple geometries of triangle and circle are icons for shelter and sun – the rising orb, seen from inside a nomadic tent structure, enacts the slow passage of time.

A sheer curtain, a veil, blocks the rest of the gallery. The poet enters through the veil. He watches the triangle screen, the patterns, the disk turning in the projector, the circular movement of light, the circle passing through the triangle.

In Arabic he recites:

“Halt you both that we may weep from memory of a love and an abode
In the winding of the dune between Al-Dakhuul, then Hawmal,

Then Tuudih, then Al-Miqraat, their traces not having been erased,
In what the wind wove from a south and a north…”

Together we are in a place of new understanding. The triangular screen becomes the opening of a tent. From within the tent we watch the sun move from South to North.

For the poet, the circle illuminates the ancient poem.

For my part, I feel exalted by what the poem has released in the room.
Rewarded by my inner-outer travels, I see how truth appears in obscure places.

My journey has something to do with history – an attempt to understand the past,
to illuminate ancient patterns.

I sit inside my “tent”, my native “home” space, where I contemplate the journey.

My inner homeland is not far away. I sense it, smell its shores.