We arrive at the brickworks late morning in June and park the car by the large ring kiln, now a ruin but with the tall chimney still intact, rising above us like an ominous beacon of late 19th century industry.

As a Palestinian, it is impossible for me to ignore the threads of repression, violence and genocide woven into the topic of land and technologies. Standing in front of this massive kiln, the chimney rises like a hallmark of horrors to come.

Rubble in Berlin was never innocent but today it is a place that feels to me like a sacred symbol that is untouchable as it mirrors the devastation of Gaza, the massacre of Palestinians, and for this same reason it compels me as an urgent and loud site of intervention. The genocide is still happening. The genocide is no longer happening. The locations are different but the sites are the same.

We walk around the kiln and a man comes out of a building which appears to be a Kita. A stocky, pale, red-headed German man in his forties comes towards us with a stern face. He tells us we are not allowed here and must leave. We explain we are artists and interested in the kiln’s structure and history. He doesn’t budge, tells us it is now a storage for builders and asks us, again, to leave. We backtrack, feeling confused about his forward, defensive stance that leaves us feeling somewhat unsafe. (Is he protecting the kids? From what? Us?)

We drive a bit further up the road, I notice it is slightly convex and paved with large uneven stones. Signs warn us that unauthorized parked vehicles will be towed. We see some men working on a house and I step out of the car to ask for directions, only too aware I have the palest skin of the three of us and embarrassed to imagine it gives us an advantage. I ask them how to get to the lake and where to park, trying to push a harmless foreigner vibe as far as possible, again embarrassed to imagine this gives us an advantage. We get their authorization to park nearby and walk from there.

As we pack our rucksacks for the walk I notice Jorge dropping a geolocation pin on his phone and send it to a friend. He says that way if anything happens someone knows where to find us. It dawns on me that for him, a Puerto Rican man, walking in Brandenburg is the same felt sense of danger as for me when I go on a date; taking the same precaution when walking into unknown and not impossible danger. I understand his concern, Brandenburg is AfD territory. Already earlier he was on the lookout for the Confederate flag, which is often used as a symbol of right wing stances here where Nazi symbols like the black cross are illegal.

We are here because Amara is doing an artist residency at Savvy Contemporary and has invited me to join her in an open conversation about land and identity. We decide to go and collect some local clay to work with and Jorge joins us for the ride. During our first meeting we had a discussion around words and objects, and I expressed the inadequacy and limitations of each to really express the thoughts and emotions and ideas we want to convey. We agree on a certain frustration and also that it’s perhaps too much pressure anyways to put on a single object. This suddenly seems to open up and multiply possibilities rather than limit them. We talk about what it is to work with material regarding our respective identities as a Palestinian and a Puerto Rican, our relationship to land, ancestry, culture and the hypocrisy and theft of colonizers.

After our meeting, an anger that is present in me finds a direction, or perhaps the inadequacy of objects reminds me I am after questions not answers, and I find a bit of courage to finally enter the world of clay and bricks in Berlin, which has been difficult for me up till now, knowing it will awaken so many parallels. Working with clay is working with archetypes, with symbols and with memory – how can I approach clay in Berlin as a Palestinian and not address Berlin’s history, its destruction, its walls, its relationship to genocide?! The insanity of Berlin becoming actual twin cities with Tel Aviv. How will I deal with bricks and rubble, with kilns, with the current identity of the land itself when the clay used for Berlin’s bricks is found in the depths of Brandenburg, which is now politically extreme right territory?

On the drive there Amara reminds me of clay’s innocence, but also of its largeness.
She asks me if I intend to address or incorporate this somehow into the work. After all, this clay took hundreds of thousands of years to become, how do I feel about addressing it as a symbol of this tiny fragment of history that is the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries?

These questions give me pause for thought. I decide that it’s important for me to carry my emotional impulse and my intentions no matter how precise they are, how present and so very now, when meeting such a large material. It is where material and I overlap after all and I am by far the smaller one. I always experienced my work as a collaboration with material, and in this sense material will also bring in its own voice on its own terms. I am not trying to coerce it and there will be plenty of space and an inevitability for clay itself to address this vast timelessness. In my experience wild clay brings a mixture of a largeness that can hold it all as well as its own subjectivity. I don’t think clay is impartial. This is a strange thing to say because we can be philosophical about the idea of “will” here but I want to clarify and say clay doesn’t have a will the way we understand our own sense of will. Still I insist on using ‘will’ to talk about clay’s material qualities and the sense it imparts that it belongs to itself. I find it in how it moves in my hands and in the kiln – these can be referred to as its technical properties of course but I find it also in the way clay can express something of itself like this. We also talk of clay having a memory, and as ceramicists, some of us choose to allow for a certain behaviour of the material we don’t wish to account for. This is not for lack of scientific rigour or knowledge of the material, this is an intentional choice on the part of the artist to allow clay to express something of its own when allowed to do so freely. At the risk of anthropomorphising material I still wish to use the terms ‘will’ and ‘memory’ as phenomena that can nonetheless lay outside of human-centric experiences. It is also a wish to counterpoint ideas of scientific rigour which we too often place as above other ways of knowing and working. It is a way of meeting material that allows for a relinquishing of control, and a collaborative element emerges. Perhaps it is linked to the timelessness clay holds that there is a desire to work with it like this. We start to touch things we cannot name and clay is especially good at that, it eludes us somehow and reminds us of things bigger than ourselves, things we cannot fully grasp. It is no wonder it features in so many origin myths, not only for its corporeal or grounding qualities, or its ability to morph and be molded, but I think there is a direct experience of origin within it; billions of years ago, we crawled out of the mud. We went from the water to the land, and I believe this is deeply imprinted in our collective unconscious, our nervous systems, and in our DNA. I believe clay helps us calibrate our nervous systems.

La reflexión de la materia

Reflections on my practice for infocerámica
Kindly translated into Spanish on their site by Wladimir Vivas 

As I was contemplating the invitation to write about my work for Info Ceramica, I saw an opportunity to unpack some thoughts around my relationship to the ceramic material. It feels like a challenge as it is a vast yet specific connection viewable through various lenses, the lenses themselves being under observation and part of the work. Here, I would like to talk mainly about my sculptural practice.

A central part of my work are the qualities of maps and territories (Cf. Korzybski “the map is not the territory”). I think using this as an analogy to look at how I engage with material works well as I relate with my practice on different levels, like an overlay of maps at various scales through which we can zoom in and out of.

On the personal scale, there is my individual relationship to clay. Parallel to that, I can zoom out and look at the larger collective entanglement with the material. I can zoom even further and consider outer space and the rich narratives about material physics and particles that inform how we navigate the world. From that point I can also zoom back in but away from the human this time, and into the material; the mountain, the cave, the brick, the soil, which my work also concerns itself with. This parallel zooming in and out movement is also circular, from human to ceramic and back again, as the material gives birth to archetypes in our psyche, in my psyche, and informs my relationship to clay.

So as an individual, ceramic is enmeshed with my personal identity, namely my longing for reconnecting with ancestral land and people. As a diaspora Palestinian clay has been a vector for reconnecting to soil and expressing this dispossession, with clay becoming a universal proxy. The very choice of working with clay has felt for me at its core like a constant re-enactement of this longing, no matter what I make.

There is also the idea of memory and my larger cultural identity. In that sense I have used the ceramic practice to make work that fills my need to find my way back to – biological and cultural – ancestors. I look at material as a door which could give me access, even if only remotely. Whilst this was tentative or symbolic at first, I realised the very act of searching and tip-toeing around my Palestinianess was my identity – the aspect of not being able to find the way in, or to inhabit it fully, defined my experience as a diaspora Palestinian for a long time. There is a compulsion to break open the material and to have it claim me back.

In my work I also zoom further out to a ceramic-human engagement that is anchored in material. Craft is a technology of time, of memory, of our capacity to store concepts in the ceramic material. Clay has properties of lending itself. The oldest piece of ceramic on record is a scultpure of a female figure, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, made 30,000 years ago. Whoever made it took a lump of clay and used its properties to create a portable item capable triggering thoughts, and I felt a need for engaging with this ability, to insert idea into material, and also to be able to extract it.

Using clay as storage is central in my work, both in the sense of the functional vessel, and in the abstract sense of imbuing objects with the symbolic. Using the vessel as a symbol for storage, I usually close the vessels I make with various slabs that stand on top of the opening. With these pieces I feel the close to clay and to a feeling for craft and memory. This obstruction is also an impulse to accumulate, to stack, to protect, to store for later and to remember. These are qualities I find inherent to the collective relationship to clay and that I want to be in conversations with.

Continuing to zoom out, I reach a blurrier map of archaic concepts where the material is entangled with the collective unconscious. Here I can freely engage with archetypes; the seed, the vessel, the cave, the extruded form. It feels like a forge, a primordial soup, and a place that doesn’t ask for answers. It is also here that I look at matter as a lens to view collective narratives at their source. I begin to cross a threshold where I can zoom back in through another door, moving from the human aspect to the material properties themselves.

Having changed scales from the individual to the collective to where we meet the abstract, I now start to zoom back in, into the clay matter. Like a human-to-clay gradient. And my work concerns itself very much with this because ultimately, an object takes form and this form is somewhat not up to me.