HiaTUS

The Hiatus, the second phase of a longer project on Diaspora, began in the early days of my migration to Germany or perhaps even sooner, in those feverish months of waiting, and took shape in the autumn of 2021 through various photographic tools, from analog cameras to whatever digital ones I could access later. The word “hiatus” comes from Latin, from the verb hiare, meaning to gape open to describe a kind of rupture. A crack, like the mouth of a cave.

The core of this project lies in articulating the rupture between language and space, felt so intensely by a migrant, by me, in a new territory. Space was language, and I did not know the language. So I carved a fissure through pixels, a gap through which I could observe the outside. I bent space to narrate the off-stage history beyond borders. LURKING.

To leap through the gap is to return from pixels to numbers, then turning numbers back into pixels, layer upon layer, a sedimentation that becomes an archive of what you as an immigrant who is not able to gaze straight into.

To peer through the fissure is to still be afraid to not see everything. To let the body of the spectator feign blindness, to flee into the margins. The politicized body, once uprooted from its soil, becomes neither body nor political only residue. Everything expires, but does not vanish; it still wants to see. So it looks from the margin, for memory, through the fold of geography, and sees all things historically.

To peer through the fissure is to cast a brief, harsh light upon a Schrödingerian subject, momentarily illuminating from a center outside the crack, yet never quite seeing the whole subject. Just fragments. Sometimes just a trace of light. And that light is the margin.