CARRIED : Because nothing is ever truly left behind
City Hall Square, MelaArena
Friday 14 – Sunday 16 August
Different times
Performance with Nathalie Vairac
Sunday, August 16
14.00
Visnings, nummer en:
Spinning the yarn(s) with Sarah Kazmi
Friday, August 14
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Saturday 15 – Sunday 16 August
12.00 – 19.00
To carry is to have crossed – in the arms of a parent, on the back of a wave, in the folds of a language, in the lingering memory of a dish cooked in a kitchen that no longer exists. Every migrant carries something that cannot be packed away: a scent, a tone, a way of carrying grief that belongs to another shore.
Migration represents not a break, but a crease, the instant when a life bends upon itself to traverse water, borders, or silence, before unfolding in a new place, transformed yet true to its former self.
This art project brings together artists whose work explores the interior territories of migration. They don’t look at statistics or sensationalized tragedies, but rather at the intimate texture of displacement. This includes the languages that are lost while sleeping, the scents carried in luggage without knowing it, and the gods that are reinstalled on a new shelf in a foreign apartment.
Through three distinct practices, the artists navigate the sensory archaeology of migration: culinary memories as repositories of identity and longing; water, as both passage and boundary, the element that separates and connects; and air, that invisible carrier of voices, rhythms and the unnamed feeling of elsewhere.
The works presented in this exhibition intersect the lenses of the Indian Ocean world, South Asia, and the contemporary diaspora. They ask what it means to belong to several places at once, or to none of them completely. They celebrate the figure of the traveler, who is constantly in motion without ever truly arriving, creating a new language in the process.
It is there, in that interstitial space, that culture is born.
About the artists
Natalie Vairac
Natalie Vairac
For more than 20 years, actress Nathalie Vairac has graced stages in France, at the Avignon International Festival, as well as theatres across the Caribbean and Africa. Her extensive repertoire includes Greek tragedies, works by Shakespeare, French classics and contemporary dramas. In 2014, she was awarded the Saana Award for Best Actress in Kenya. She also works as a mentor, sharing her expertise with both new and established actors.
For "Carried", Vairac uses water as a healing space, a place where the body remembers before words can form. Her performance traces the resilience that follows the trauma of migration. How does a lost language leave its mark on the flesh? How does water, as an element of passage and purification, become the medium of intimate reconstruction?
Sarah Kazmi
Display, number one: Spinning the yarn(s)
Visnings start from dedicated transatlantic research, where Kazmi is taking a critical and intimate look at the archives and traces of the Norwegian emigration to the North Americas in the 19th - 20th centuries. As the Pakistani migrants to Norway 100 years later, Norwegians emigrants left to seek their fortunes, seeking a better life. They built churches, opened shops and restaurants and gathered in their own ghettos like (Lapskaus boulevard in New York), creating subcultures that outlived the first generation of movers by decades, even centuries. Everything to maintain their connection with the motherland, their native culture and language. While some were successful, the promise of the American dream also proved disappointing to many, as for the inhabitants of Ørkenen Sur, a colony of unemployed and homeless Norwegian immigrants, located on a landfill in Red Hook Brooklyn.
Norwegian maritime migration also produced and circulated sanctuary narratives through transnational networks of seafarers, religious institutions, and communication systems. These narratives facilitated physical migration and spiritual integration into a dispersed international community of believers. Today, they are reactivated through heritage tourism and digital technologies, where nature and landscape serve as experiential anchors for identity and memory.
Activating a form of nomadology connected to forms of migration, I am questioning, how can we present stories that have not made history? How can we keep a nomadic approach without moving? How/in what ways can we address the Norwegian emigration to North America today without only looking backwards?
Sarah Kazmi is an interdisciplinary artist, who lives and works between Oslo and Karachi. Her artistic practice moves across research and visual production, observing the relationship between food, language and politics; often based around/with communities and local environments.
