Irredeemably Foreign, 2025-Ongoing

Mix Media

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A Visual Exploration on Belonging, Exile, and the Ghosts of Time

 

Inspired by the haunting meditations of Amin Maalouf’s The Disoriented—a novel that unravels the fragility of human connection and the indelible grip of the past—this series of mixed-media works bridges the visceral parallels between Venezuela and Lebanon, two nations fractured by displacement, political decay, and the collective yearning for home.

 

Using aged postcards of Venezuelan landscapes as a foundation, I surgically excise fragments of terrain to embed passages from Maalouf’s text. These textual interventions—like scars or sutures—act as both disruption and dialogue, weaving Lebanon’s literary echoes into Venezuela’s fading vistas. The cut-out words, drawn from moments in the novel that mirror my own encounters during a month in Lebanon, evoking the dissonance of exile: nostalgia collides with rupture, idealism fractures against reality, and memory bleeds into the present.

 

The series is a direct response to Venezuela’s ongoing exodus, one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. As authoritarianism and collapse propel millions to flee, the postcards—once symbols of pride and place—become relics of a fractured identity. By interlacing Maalouf’s narratives of Lebanese migration with Venezuelan imagery, the work underscores how political failure transcends geography, binding disparate communities in shared grief and resilience.

 

Formally, the act of cutting and grafting mirrors the violence of uprooting, while the juxtaposition of text and image invites viewers to interrogate the stories we inherit, abandon, or reconstruct. The postcards’ faded hues and romanticized landscapes contrast sharply with Maalouf’s stark prose, creating a tension between imaginary and story.

 

The Disoriented asks, “How do we mourn a homeland that still exists?” "From Afar" reframes this question for Venezuela, where the act of leaving becomes a kind of communal haunting—a reckoning with what is lost, what remains, and what is reimagined. 

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