Late , 2015

With Mariam Said Dual-channel video installation 19 min Color, sound

"…A few months later, still trying to assimilate my new condition, I found myself composing a long explanatory letter to my mother, who had already been dead for almost two years, a letter that inaugurated a belated attempt to impose a narrative on a life that I had left more or less to itself, disorganised, scattered, uncentred. block, depression or running dry."

In an autobiographical essay Between Worlds, Edward Said mentions a letter that he wrote to his mother, but this letter remains unpublished to this day. Halloubi went to New York to find this letter, but without success. The letter was not found but the video took another direction in response to this absent letter. A photo of Said’s hand found in the apartment of Mariam Said, the widow of the writer, is used in the video installation as an intimate portrait of Said. At the end of his life, sick, conscious of his mortality and in an urgent political situation after September 11, Said broaches the final phase of his life with a reflection on late style and asks himself “but what about the late works of artists when, far from being synonymous with harmony and the resolution of conflicts, they are, on the contrary, marked by intransigence, a painful effort, and unresolved contradictions?”

The two-channel installation “Late” takes up what is forsaken or abandoned and what comes late to history.