LATE2015
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essay titled Between Worlds, Edward Said mentions a letter he once wrote to his mother, but this letter remains unpublished to this day. Halloubi traveled to New York in search of it, without success. The letter was never found, but the video took another direction in response to this absence. A photograph of Said’s hand, discovered in the apartment of Mariam Said, the writer’s widow, was used as a starting point for the narration.
In this work, Halloubi is particularly interested in the construction of what is missing, rather than in what is present as archive or document. This approach opens up space for interpretation and fictional exploration.
At the end of his life — ill, aware of his mortality, and in a politically urgent context after September 11 — Said approached this final phase with a reflection on "late style."