On the Margin of History

Poets Natasha Boskic and Mohamad Kebbewar were excited to work together since their countries, Serbia and Syria, experienced similar fates. When weaving their verses together, their lines overlapped, their words chased each other. Their voices echoed with the same emptiness, recognizing a human soul can be peeled, layer by layer, revealed through art. They connected with artist, Mary McDonald whose interests lie in posing poetry narrative against and within layers of sound, silence, image, video, to create a poetry film and Augmented Reality (AR) installation.

Fragmented layers of sound and image within the poetry film and AR exhibit reproduce a sense of displacement and erasure, exposing the reverberating loss of destruction of people and place, family, heritage, traditions, cultures. The AR exhibit consists of a mosaic of stills. When viewed with the AR app on a smartphone, these stills become short video clips. These fragments explore the surreal experience of displacement.

On the Margin of History is witness to destruction of ancient history and sharp demographic change in Aleppo, city of six million people that lost ninety percent of its residents over six years, then filled with new people. It is witness to the breakdown of former Yugoslavia, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia where silence was the only response to events that left people shocked, disbelieving. It’s a transdisciplinary project considering tensions between personal voice and possibilities within digital visual to suggest and reinforce false narratives and/or create understandings through metaphor, playing with all levels of perception. Text is digitally exploded, creating reverberating echoes of lost words, lost truths.