Paths of Memory: Sun & Sea, Lamia Joreige and Etel Adnan
by Leena Aboutaleb
Lamia Joreige’s ‘Sun & Sea’ (translated to English by Omar Berrada, Sarah Riggs and Lamia Joreige) is a melting collage between her footage of a sun-soaked Greek summer and Etel Adnan’s dazzling first poem, written in French in 1949.
Adnan’s poem “Le Livre de la Mer,” is an ode to the sun and sea, working as both cosmetically clarifying and a ecstatic prophecy as Adnan restructures the world under the plains of Greece and its gods. Placing the sea and sun in ‘a kind of cosmic eroticism’ as the sea is ‘the original life’ as ‘eternity runs on fluid matter…washed out in the sea,’ Adnan spins the world; as ancient as the first fibre and as new-born as the pulled loom, in a shifting coronation. The two are following, followed, and follow one another, tied in a crown made of both as they push and pull as lovers and else.
Joriege’s methodological and intimate placing of footage drowns in frame to Adnan’s ode, as the two merge their voices occasionally throughout the piece like a melody. As if conducting a symphony, the two artists chant: ‘...ecstasy facing the sky and water fulfilled among its creatures Sun’s glory repeated.’ Joriege’s work, visually, contains the elements of Adnan’s seas and rivers of momentary infinity. The lapse and limbo apparent in Adnan’s setting solidifies Joriege’s role in the project; as Adnan provides the language to build a world, Joriege hands over the world itself to be made under the two.
‘A primordial ephebe, the sea says,’ and so Adnan collapses even a simple gender into a plurality, resting on Nietzsche and the spinning of eternity. Adnan graces her readers with a language so ecstatic and far-reaching that the only weight they rest on are the world itself.
A woman washes herself, the morning is fresh, she lends you a smile covered by the sun’s light, and woman and sea are both one and nothing. Happier than the sun, the sun says ‘the sea groans like a dog’ as he arms his archangels. The knives become rain in a storm. A dialectic and didactic eternal day, the two work in creating a radical possibility for us.
Joriege’s essay-film can never be meretricious, instead she soaks the page and frame for the viewer leaving us to deep-dive into her tremendous body of work. The passages of murdered Palestinian soldiers in Uncertain Times coalesce itself with Adnan’s ‘primordial ephebe’ as two soldiers of long-dead empires. Half-way through the project, we are stilled in the silence of a mountain in the middle of the sea, entirely isolated and drenched in a light fog. The screen flickers, and a page appears. Adnan and Joriege speak, intoning: ‘The sea burns, summer moved forward within her. Sun enters her eyes and tells her his essence and his story. After the fervour, the freshness. Sea enters and covers him over, his eyes burn in the water…She is a fabric; her vertical is water and her horizontal is light. She tells of her liquid essence and luminous story.”
The cataclysmic and sempiternal nature of Adnan’s poem melded into Joriege’s visuals and landscapes creates a world that we have seemingly forgotten about, or — a world that is waiting for us to return into. As Etel says, “I have the feeling that Greece is a place that liberates you from yourself.”
Adnan’s poem “Le Livre de la Mer,” is an ode to the sun and sea, working as both cosmetically clarifying and a ecstatic prophecy as Adnan restructures the world under the plains of Greece and its gods. Placing the sea and sun in ‘a kind of cosmic eroticism’ as the sea is ‘the original life’ as ‘eternity runs on fluid matter…washed out in the sea,’ Adnan spins the world; as ancient as the first fibre and as new-born as the pulled loom, in a shifting coronation. The two are following, followed, and follow one another, tied in a crown made of both as they push and pull as lovers and else.
Joriege’s methodological and intimate placing of footage drowns in frame to Adnan’s ode, as the two merge their voices occasionally throughout the piece like a melody. As if conducting a symphony, the two artists chant: ‘...ecstasy facing the sky and water fulfilled among its creatures Sun’s glory repeated.’ Joriege’s work, visually, contains the elements of Adnan’s seas and rivers of momentary infinity. The lapse and limbo apparent in Adnan’s setting solidifies Joriege’s role in the project; as Adnan provides the language to build a world, Joriege hands over the world itself to be made under the two.
‘A primordial ephebe, the sea says,’ and so Adnan collapses even a simple gender into a plurality, resting on Nietzsche and the spinning of eternity. Adnan graces her readers with a language so ecstatic and far-reaching that the only weight they rest on are the world itself.
A woman washes herself, the morning is fresh, she lends you a smile covered by the sun’s light, and woman and sea are both one and nothing. Happier than the sun, the sun says ‘the sea groans like a dog’ as he arms his archangels. The knives become rain in a storm. A dialectic and didactic eternal day, the two work in creating a radical possibility for us.
Joriege’s essay-film can never be meretricious, instead she soaks the page and frame for the viewer leaving us to deep-dive into her tremendous body of work. The passages of murdered Palestinian soldiers in Uncertain Times coalesce itself with Adnan’s ‘primordial ephebe’ as two soldiers of long-dead empires. Half-way through the project, we are stilled in the silence of a mountain in the middle of the sea, entirely isolated and drenched in a light fog. The screen flickers, and a page appears. Adnan and Joriege speak, intoning: ‘The sea burns, summer moved forward within her. Sun enters her eyes and tells her his essence and his story. After the fervour, the freshness. Sea enters and covers him over, his eyes burn in the water…She is a fabric; her vertical is water and her horizontal is light. She tells of her liquid essence and luminous story.”
The cataclysmic and sempiternal nature of Adnan’s poem melded into Joriege’s visuals and landscapes creates a world that we have seemingly forgotten about, or — a world that is waiting for us to return into. As Etel says, “I have the feeling that Greece is a place that liberates you from yourself.”