The Beginning of Memory - Mayssa Fattouh
Souvenir
Opening May 6th 19:00h.
From 7th to 20th of May 2025
Open by appointment:
espai.souvenir@gmail.com
www.espaisouvenir.com
Sound performance by Tom Chant on 06.05.2025, 19.30h
Food and storytelling workshop (RSVP) on 12.05.2025
Inscriptions: espai.souvenir@gmail.com – mayssa.f@gmail.com
From the earliest murmurs of humankind and ancient rites to the tools we shaped with our hands and the homes we built from the earth, stones have accompanied us. They have borne our memory, both human and geological, and have stood quietly in the foundations of all we have called history.
They are bearers of the slow passage of time with a gravity that is never indifferent, though it may seem so. Their presence is a record of our existence, as the first and the last witnesses.
Still, yet never truly mute, they echo. Absolute silence, after all, belongs to the void, to the reaches beyond our atmosphere; the earth, even in stillness, resounds.
The stone is alive. It listens, holds, transforms.
Animism reminds us that matter is never mere material, but a communion of relations. Ibn Arabi, the Arab Andalusian Sufi philosopher, names it tajalli, in which the divine or the metaphysical becomes visible in every form, even in a pebble and calls for the language of signs where everything speaks. To attend to stone is to partake in that unveiling.
The Beginning of Memory is the first gesture I have made toward tracing a personal cartography through stone. It is, in one sense, a private meditation – philosophical, political, metaphysical. Yet it remains open, as any true vessel must be, porous and generous. It receives other stories, with the hope of sheltering them and listens back.
Part stone, part ocarina, part cave or safe, this variable ceramic installation offers itself as a potential place of telling and keeping. A chamber for voices, dreams, sounds, small lives, and cherished objects, each one carried here, each one held. In its clay walls lies the space for resonance, for breath and becoming, holding tension between intimacy and violence, the domestic and the dislocated.
The medium is no coincidence, it holds the symbolic significance as memory, metamorphosis and earth. In contexts of colonialism, clay becomes a material of resistance and repair, entwined with land, identity, and the body. It comes to assert presence in the face of erasure and shape continuity even when the home is gone.
The title was borrowed from a Laurie Anderson song on her album Homeland, which found me in the wake of the unfolding of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, whose horrific reality sparked this work. Here one of the readings of the stone is as a signifier of defiance – picked from the land and thrown into terrible relief against the sterile precision of a robotic army. Where there is no heart, the stone speaks. Contrary to the expression “a heart made of stone,” it is the stone that, in this case, holds the tenderness of the land, the rupture of exile, the grief of displacement.
In this initial iteration, musician Tom Chant is invited to dwell within the work and offer sound in return. His composition is drawn from one of the stories entrusted to him, letting echo meet echo, and crack be altered. His presence not only sonic, but relational, a listener, a channel, a caretaker of resonance.
In conjunction with the installation, Fattouh will be conducting a food workshop of a traditional Mediterranean recipe, passed on from generations and prepared collectively, here alongside readings of texts and storytelling.
Mayssa Fattouh’s curatorial and multidisciplinary practice explore the intersections of memory, collective imaginaries, environmental concerns and social behaviour, what she describes as a practice of collective care.
Tom Chant is a saxophonist and composer from London living in Barcelona.Tom focuses mainly on free improvised music which he has been involved in for 30 years.
