عريب طوقان oraib toukan
1 Donkey & 3 Phrases, 2007
Three-Channel video installation, looped: wood, mirror: each 40 x 30 x 30 (cm)
One donkey and three phrases, is a three-channel installation of a donkey I periodically worked with to eat carrot puree of my writings on collective memory. Ultimately the donkey only successfully ate the phrases ‘I perceived a past,’ ‘I remembered a present,’ and ‘I witnessed a future’. Each phrase is placed inside a mirrored box that requires the audience to peak inside to view the video. What results is an intimate self-reflection with, and of, a donkey’s narrative on memory. Here I question my role as author/dictator in the process. I work with a soul to say what I want him to say, with out him knowing what it is that he is saying and what it is that I am doing. I lure him with feed. I likewise lure the spectacle with a knee jerking desire to ‘peep’ only to find a dual reflection of the self and the donkey. In using tautological opposites in the video, I find myself repeatedly fascinated by a certain absurdity in our present. After completing the video Remind me to remember to forget I began researching various animals, and their ability to remember. Donkeys began to interest me for their particularly strong visual memory. In parallel to that I was working with gathering documentary photos of the Nakba. In these I found myself interested in the role of the donkey in facilitating the 1948 mass exodus from Palestine in to Jordan.
