We have taken so much for granted including language and our local and global relationships. Framing, conceptualizing, grasping, and coming to terms with our lives as artists and citizens of this wide world may seem more important now than ever. How do you position yourself in the midst of all this? Is your relationship to your neighbours different? Has our role as artists and citizens changed. I mean, what makes us decide to instill an agency in our work, an embracement of the social sphere or an engagement with politics that would make others want to do the same? On the other hand, what makes us want to run away from it all? Perhaps.. the two motives are the same. 'untitled' is an ongoing multi-channel video installation continuing Salloum’s series of projects addressing social and political realities and representations, manifestations, and enunciations. This project focuses on borders, nationalisms, movements (shifts, transitions, and interstitial space/time), subjectivity, and the conditions of living between polarities of culture, geography, history, and ideology.The installation is not modeled on the viewing of art (i.e. painting) but on an approach to research or reading, an active living archive where all viewing is incomplete in the sense of having seen all. An atmosphere of visual collision, collaboration, contextualization, critical interference or mutual existence emanates from the tapes themselves and the viewing of the material. The screens play off of one another creating an imagistic experience of the physical/visceral and of the underlying subjectivity experienced through the body, as crisis, nation, and metaphor, or in transition and shift, and in the recounting or enunciatory nature of the interstitial site. The dialectical relationship of the speaker and the spoken is highlighted, the speech laid bare and layered between the story, the fields of images, the suggested frames and the butted fictive and documentary process. Difference is articulated in the literal and metaphorical spaces of displacement and dwelling, the constitution of this being viewed as cultural meanings rather than only as an extension of (an)other locale/space or subjective relationship. Histories of movement are examined along gender, class and race lines, taking into consideration legacies of empire, conflict and capital, and the contested and conflicted notions of homeland, nation, diaspora, exile, travel, assimilation, refuge, native and other in an attempt to challenge our realities and perceptions and in doing so, reclaim and reconstruct an agency that is complex and self determining. Last night of spring break. I was a couple of days into the week when I realized that my plans to get lots of work done, and get lots of rest were essentially incompatible. I opted for rest, with a little work. Now, I can't imagine walking back into the classroom tomorrow. It was interesting to see the Soha tape along with the tape of the older man telling his story. It made for a complex layering of the notions of home and loss. The older man is narrative. And, the piece made me think about how narrative is a useful way to structure knowledge. The scene seemed almost pedagogical — he tells the story while the younger men listen. Narrative is also portable - it's what he's carried with him, and what he can give to those who are younger - a story of loss. The Soha piece is non-narrative — like any conversation, it's about breaks and pieces, interruptions and turning toward what the other said. I see that this was a good way to pull away from the narrative that dominates her — the martyr's narrative. Made me think of the problems with narrative, the fixing of one meaning (she resists titling). This tape made me think differently about fragmentation, loss, and home. Couldn't remember if I'd rambled this to you or not. Love, A.S.