AYREEN ANASTAS

Palestine/USA

Ayreen Anastas writes in fragments and makes films and videos. Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005), m* of Bethlehem (2003), the Library of Useful Knowledge (2002) have been shown internationally in festivals, museums and cinemas but not yet broadcast on television. She often collaborates with Rene Gabri: most recently they were commissioned to produce the work Camp Campaign. She is one of the organizers of 16 Beaver Group. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was published in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 16, Number 3, July 2004. She has no affection for the proclamation of victory. Troubled by any image of herself, suffers when she is named.

AYREEN ANASTAS
Pasolini Pa* Palestine
51 min, 2005, video still
Courtesy of the artists

'Pasolini Pa* Palestine' is an attempt to repeat Pasolini's trip to Palestine in his film 'Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’' in 1963. It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung 'repetition, retrieval', is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude towards the past. "By the repetition of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its original, so far hidden possibilities". The project ventures a conversation and a dialogue with Pasolini especially his 'Poem for the Third World'. Discutere, (to smash to pieces), is the Latin source of dialogue, discussion. The work does not criticize Pasolini, but reveals unnoticed possibilities in his thought and works back to the experiences that inspired it.
'Pasolini Pa* Palestine' was commissioned by Almamal Foundation Residency in Jerusalem.