Artist Statement
Time stops. The clock’s pointer, at all times alarmed, stands still. A human archive, burdened, walks through alleyways full of mud from leaky pipes, avoiding a short circuit, and dodging a T-shirt drying from a line tied to the window. With my uncle’s shoes, and Sitti (my grandmother) crazily shouting, reproaching me; I, Hadriti (“your highness,” as my grandmother calls me, mockingly), forgot to close the tap. She shouts: “I wish I would die so you would know my worth, you troublemaker!” The football field is gone; the colonizer constructed a military road on top of it. We play in narrow alleyways instead, just one and half meters wide but stretching up and down the camp. A human archive writes on our refugee camp walls, repeating the stories that emerge through the vicious loop of time. There’s no point in turning the page on the calendar. The ninety-year old as registered in the documents of the colonizer’s archive is still fifteen, and the one who is seventy-five years old in the colonizer’s documents was actually born today, yesterday, tomorrow. They were all born and are all being born here.
In the refugee camp, the future we are facing is more of this endless present. But in the future that we want, we reclaim the happiness that was stolen from us.
