Now Eat My Script

Inspired by the models of microhistory theorized by Carlo Ginzburg, Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh employs painting, photography, and video in her research to understand macro political and social discourses through individual and family migration stories. In Now Eat My Script, the sense of loss and uprooting experienced by those forced to leave their homes and migrate to another country is recounted in the first person through the words of a woman—a writer and future mother—traveling from Lebanon to Syria. Through a rigorous aesthetic approach, in which certain objects—first a car loaded with personal belongings, then the body of a lamb cut into pieces on a white surface—are isolated from any spatial context, and a linguistic approach where the narration of her migrant experience intertwines with family news that becomes viral through the internet, the artist questions the actual ability to translate real events. Hunger, both real and metaphorical—the hunger of the migrant and the writer—becomes a symbol of the frustration between the deeply human need to document and the impossibility of fully expressing the trauma endured.