Affective Rematriation in the Art of Mounira Al Solh

A Day is as Long as a Year 2022 is an embroidered tent installation by the Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh (born 1978), produced in collaboration with women from Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iran (fig.1). Inside the tent, the Arabic word al-iztīāḥ, which translates to ‘displacement’, is sewn in black and white thread alongside floral and avian motifs, reminiscent of Iranian carpets and regional Islamic ornamentation across Lebanon and other parts of West Asia (fig.2).1 Elsewhere in the tent, fabric panels varying in size and colour display the names of the women who collaborated with Al Solh – ‘Zeliha’, ‘Gigi’, ‘Yolanda’ and ‘Sahel’ – while larger suspended panels carry the women’s testimonies (fig.3).2 Hidden speakers play Arabic words drawn from the tent’s inscriptions, recited by the Lebanese singer Rima Khcheich. This is accompanied by Iranian songs of mourning performed by Iranian women.3 Stitched among names, other words and phrases as well as patterns, the word al-iztīāḥ comes to signify a shared cultural experience of loss and movement.

The tent is a recurring motif in Al Solh’s practice, a mobile shelter functioning as a site of collective engagement. As a form long associated with displacement and the provisional conditions of refugee life, the tent carries an inherent political resonance that Al Solh activates and transforms through collaboration. These works, like many of Al Solh’s installations, create spaces where the affective, cultural and spatial fractures of displacement and forced migration are tenderly held, humanised and unveiled. Across her film, multimedia and installation works the artist foregrounds storytelling, collaboration and material engagement. For Al Solh, collective artmaking is a dialogic process that unsettles distinctions between producing and caring. Working with the artist in her studio, participants contribute their own words, skills and stories, shaping the formal and narrative structures of the work. Alongside the women, Al Solh works with tailors, translators and sound technicians, collectively producing what the artist calls a ‘breathing library’.4

Having lived through the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) – a conflict that uprooted communities through both displacement and forced migration – Al Solh works from within realities shaped by this rupture.5 This article proposes the concept of ‘affective rematriation’ as a framework to describe the way belonging is reconstituted in Al Solh’s practice through material and affective practices rather than legal restitution.

The term rematriation has been used by decolonial artists such as Outi Pieski to describe the return or recovery of ancestral histories and knowledges.6 In Al Solh’s work rematriation encompasses the sharing of testimony and the use of embroidery to recover emotional, cultural and communal bonds. This approach does not rest solely on associations between women and care; rather it critically engages the structures that regulate historical narration, artistic authorship and the representation of war in postcolonial contexts. By foregrounding women as narrators of war and displacement within a medium historically marginalised as ‘craft’, Al Solh challenges state-centred historiography as well as the de-humanising frameworks through which displaced peoples and their countries are often represented.

This article traces what affective rematriation can mean in practice – how making can articulate forms of belonging that go beyond the limits of formal and legal restitution processes – across three registers of Al Solh’s practice: the architectural, the drawn and the ornamental.

Displacement and memory in the Arab world

Displacement and forced migration throughout the Arab World and West Asia have been shaped by the lingering impacts of colonial control, compounded by successive conflicts including the Lebanese Civil War as well as wars and revolutions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.7 These events have left countless people internally displaced, exiled or stateless, transforming migration into a condition of survival.8 Moreover governments across the region have established gendered nationality laws that prevent women from passing citizenship to their descendants, leaving generations of children born into legal uncertainty.9 These circumstances shape personal lives, family creation and understandings of historical belonging.

As the feminist scholar Mervat Hatem observes, women’s political agency has been curtailed across the Arab World and West Asia even as these societies relied on women’s social and reproductive labour.10 This exclusion is not only political but temporal. Women’s experiences have been systematically omitted from the dominant historical narratives that privilege military operation, nation-building and linear models of development. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), in which the author distinguishes between linear time and time she associates with female subjectivity, feminist theorists have described these experiences as ‘feminist temporalities’.11 Through her art, Al Solh constructs a material and affective landscape informed by displacement and trauma that resists state-centred histories and unfolds through cyclical, non-linear temporalities.

Displacement must be understood not only as a legal and political condition but also as a lived and affective one. As the literary critic Edward Said notes, exile manifests through grief, trauma and the yearning for home, positioning it both as a political reality and an emotional condition that can be transmitted across generations.12 This affective dimension of exile is not passively suffered but actively transmitted. The social anthropologist Paul Connerton argues that social memory is preserved through bodily and habitual practices repeated and transmitted through generations.13 Displacement thus produces what might be described as an ‘affective landscape’ shaped by memory and inherited trauma, which is conveyed through songs, repeated gestures and ways of making. Al Solh’s work is situated within this landscape, where displacement, memory and practice intersect, engaging the intergenerational links between people, places and experiences.

In Lebanon the postcolonial conditions of conflict and sectarianism continue to impact familial and national bonds. These realities feed into both Al Solh’s artistic process and her political stance. Born in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, she also has familial ties to Syria through her mother, exposing her to conflict and displacement. Her circumstances have informed her decision to create collaborative artworks with women from West Asia and the Arab world who have experienced war, displacement and legal precarity. Her work does not speak for them; rather, it creates spaces for the women’s own material and aesthetic expressions of such experiences.

Although Al Solh herself has not been formally categorised as a refugee, her practice is informed by personal and familial stories of movement, war and a loss of home.14 In 2003 she relocated from Lebanon to Amsterdam, a move that she describes as providing greater anonymity and permitting her to express her thoughts freely, despite Western expectations placed on artists from post-conflict zones and in the Arab world.15 Al Solh’s understanding of freedom grows not because of those expectations, but in opposition to them.

The artist’s films, installations and drawings may be understood through what the academic and writer Saidiya Hartman has termed ‘critical fabulation’ – using affective, creative and relational methods to compensate for the absence of archives.16 Where citizenship is denied, where official histories exclude women’s experiences and where archives are absent or hostile, Al Solh’s practice does the work of record.

The film Now Eat My Script 2014, which reflects on the exchange of goods and foods between Syria and Lebanon during periods of conflict, exemplifies Al Solh’s interweaving of personal memory with reflections on the war and displacement (fig.4). Narrated by a fictional pregnant writer who struggles with the ethics of recounting violence, the film follows the narrator’s aunt as she transports a sacrificial lamb across the Syrian-Lebanese border. While the voice over evokes scenes of domestic life – family gatherings in kitchens and living rooms and the preparation of food – the camera focuses on cars, crates filled with vegetables and the lamb’s carcass. The tension between voice and image unsettles the boundaries between nourishment, ritual slaughter and the violence the narrator struggles to represent, alluding to the brutality of war while refusing – and explicitly critiquing – the voyeuristic display of traumatised bodies.

In doing so, Now Eat My Script engages a temporality in which conflict and displacement emerge through the rhythms of domestic labour, the circulation of nourishment and embodied experience rather than through a linear narrative of warfare. The film’s sound design, which alternates between lullaby-like whispers and disorder, anticipates the aural qualities of later installations such as A Day is as Long as a Year, in which sound becomes a means of documenting matrilineal histories overlooked by official narratives.

Collective labour and embodied testimony

Focusing on A Day is as Long as a Year, this section examines how collective labour, sewing and ornament combine into a site of affective rematriation, a space where identity and memory are recovered through tactile and sonic interplay. Instead of seeking legal or political acknowledgment, Al Solh’s tent is a place where memory is lived and negotiated through everyday actions such as embroidery and storytelling, aligning with Lila Abu-Lughod’s emphasis on situated memory.17 What emerges is a space where personal histories and collaborative aesthetics merge to challenge erasure.

Read through Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation, Al Solh’s tent works can be understood as using creative and relational methods to compensate for the absence of archives, and to render visible, lives omitted by official histories. In this way, Al Solh’s approach parallels that of feminist writers such as Abu-Lughod, who documents women’s experiences without reducing them to symbols of victimhood.18 Abu-Lughod critiques the framing that West Asian and Muslim women need to be ‘saved’, advocating instead for solidarity and attentive listening.19 Al Solh’s process of listening, drawing and sewing functions as a form of witnessing where the tactile intimacy of thread and handwriting materialises experience and emotion. The work enacts what the writer and scholar Sara Ahmed calls ‘affective economies’, in which feelings of anguish, persistence and solidarity circulate across cloth and language.20 Through this process, Al Solh translates personal and collective experience of war into shared documentation, creating an affective archive that audiences can access.

A Day is as Long as a Year is both an artwork and a site of assembly. In terms of its structure and style the work resembles ceremonial Iranian-style tents from the Qajar Dynasty (1789–1925). The exterior of the tent is heavily adorned with Islamic regional art motifs and aesthetics, including floral arabesques, birds and vines (fig.5). On the inside, women’s names stitched in Arabic and English are fastened at eye-level, directing the viewer’s experience to them.

The choice of the tent as a form is not incidental: a structure long associated with displacement and the provisional conditions of refugee life, it carries an inherent political resonance. Al Solh activates and transforms this resonance by converting a symbol of precarity into a site of collective testimony. The installation was created with women from Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Türkiye, Iraq and the Netherlands, over months of workshops and gatherings held in Arabic.21

Al Solh’s use of embroidery is also politically charged. Working in a medium historically marginalised as craft and associated with women’s domestic labour, Al Solh employs what the psychotherapist Rozsika Parker has called the ‘subversive stitch’, in which women’s labour operates as a form of resistance.22 The tent also functions as a ‘consciousness-raising space’, a term used by the art historians Catriona Moore and Catherine Speck in their analysis of how Indigenous communal spaces allow artists to discuss their collective, cultural and personal stories.23 In these environments personal narratives become interwoven with active intersectional politics. In this context embroidery is not melancholic but insurgent: each embodied stitch is a form of testimony.

In A Day is as Long as a Year, participants embroidered words related to movement – such as al-iztīāḥ – onto the panels of red fabric, as well as longer testimonial stories on suspended panels (fig.6). The top of the tent was made by women in Lebanon, while side panels were stitched by women in the Netherlands, combining diasporic authorship across borders.24 One such example comes from Jana, a Lebanese woman who recalls the Beirut explosion of 4 August 2020:

The testimony is not only displayed, it is transformed. Jana’s embroidered words, accompanied by spoken voices, compress decades of traumatic events – from the Lebanese Civil War to the Beirut port explosion – into a single embodied gesture, demonstrating what Connerton means by bodily memory: history not preserved in documents but in habitual response. The testimony’s final sentence is equally significant. The inclusion of queer love, in a casual and undramatic way within a medium or context that might marginalise or omit it, is a quiet act of resistance. The tent becomes a space in which stories excluded by heteronormative historiography are preserved and made visible. The testimony’s incomplete and associative grammar formally enacts Hartman’s critical fabulation – history told through gaps and ruptures that resist consistency. In the absence of state recognition, stories such as Jana’s form essential repositories of feminist and queer political memory.

Similarly, the artist Rosemary Sayigh has shown that the act of telling stories – qussas in Arabic – in Palestinian refugee communities transmits intergenerational epistemology and history often ignored by official accounts, creating a grassroots archive of Arab women’s experiences.25 The construction of the tent itself supports this logic. Its shape evokes the kheima – an Arabic term for a traditional nomadic mobile shelter. Al Solh draws from nomadic communities in Iran, the wider Arab world and Türkiye, linking the shape to movement and endurance.26

Al Solh’s approach to collaborative making is reflected in two works created in 2022, the tent installation Lackadaisical Sunset to Sunset (fig.7, Tate T16217) and A Night Hour as Long as Night (fig.8), a tent-shaped wooden installation including fabric panels. In both works women embroidered personal stories of the Lebanese Civil War. In A Night Hour as Long as Night, an anonymous woman’s voice delivers Arabic words of love and longing.27 This is followed by the Oasis One World Choir – whose members include refugees, migrants and local residents – singing in Arabic, English and French. Their song addresses women through expressions of love, kinship and remembrance.28 Through the integration of thread and sound Al Solh reimagines these embroidered installations as feminist auditory archives of the non-linear struggles of women.

In A Day is as Long as a Year, Lackadaisical Sunset to Sunset and A Night Hour as Long as Night, craft is not melancholic, but insurgent. Embroidered text carries fragments of women’s stories and cultural renewal. The decorated panels echo the motifs of Iranian carpets, objects associated with home and inheritance. Threads – both literal and auditory – trace not only geography but also affective terrain: who was there, what was lost and what remains during war.

In Al Solh’s tent works rematriation is enacted not as the return of the body to a land but as the recovery of relation, between women, between generations, between stories and the surfaces that hold them. Belonging is reconstituted not through legal or political recognition but through the act of making together. Al Solh’s diasporic practice is an embodied praxis and return that does not require a territory.

Testimony, fragments and the archive

Since 2012 Al Solh has been drawing, painting and assembling hundreds of portraits and stories of people who have undergone exile, displacement and legal and political precarity. To create the portraits in I Strongly Believe in Our Right to be Frivolous 2012–ongoing the artist gathered testimonies from refugees affected by the Syrian revolution and subsequent civil war in 2012, later expanding the work to include refugees from Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Ethiopia (figs.9 and 10).29 Al Solh records her encounters on paper and later transfers the drawings and text onto fabric using embroidery and handwriting.30 She occasionally works with refugee women to complete the pieces, although she mostly continues the embroideries independently.31

The series takes its title from a 2002 interview with the exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), in which he stated:

Darwish’s declaration affirms Palestinians’ and other displaced people’s right to happiness and complexity, even as they are placed under duress. Al Solh’s materials – ink, watercolour, pencil and marker on yellow, lined paper – render this sentiment tangible. The portraits are drawn and annotated from real-time conversations between the artist and the participants, turning note-taking into a gesture of solidarity.33 Each work, which combines a drawing and a testimony written in English, Arabic or French, is created in one sitting.

A similar approach can be seen in earlier projects such as Rawane’s Song 2006 an autobiographical video that interlaces evasion, wit and repetition to question the authority of storytelling (fig.11). As Al Solh has explained, ‘Rawane’s Song is a video in which I express my refusal to talk about the war. The viewer reads my ironic discourse in which the avoided theme is finally not avoided’.34 Here the artist’s use of dubbing and interrupted speech anticipates the dialogic format of the Frivolous drawings.35 In both works, storytelling unfolds across time – through conversation, interruption and delay – forming a shared and nonlinear gesture in which mourning and lived experiences of the war are voiced by the interlocutors themselves.

As Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation suggests, testimony is revealed through gaps, fragments and ruptures that resist consistency. In I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, the artist listens to each speaker’s experience while allowing their silence to shape the work, making space for their story without imposing a coherent narrative. Numerous interlocutors speak of their loss or happiness in a fragmented manner. In one example the faces of two women are joined vertically with a younger woman’s likeness at the top, and the face of an older woman with white hair and rings around her eyes, in the inverted position (fig.12). The women are outlined in black ink and are loosely filled with shades of brown, pink, and grey. Their faces are framed by phrases handwritten in Arabic that document the experience of a Syrian midwife, now a refugee, who shares that:

Al Solh registers the pieces of these stories as they are being told. They are often incomplete, vulnerable and recorded in the speaker’s dialect. Alongside their words, she draws her subjects with delicate and loosely sketched lines, capturing their face and voice in the specific moment. Some of the portraits are vibrant in their use of colour, whereas others are monochrome. Some of the texts are confined to the edges of the page or the outlines of an object or body part, whereas others seem to dominate and fill the paper. This visual diversity speaks to the unevenness of human experience in times of struggle.

Al Solh’s yellow, lined paper recalls administrative forms, particularly asylum paperwork. The legal pad is the material of bureaucratic processing: the form that categorises, assess, grants and refuses. Al Solh takes a surface designed to reduce a person to their legal identity and repurposes it to record their complexity. Together, the drawings create a constellation rather than a chronology: a non-linear archive in which the administrative paper becomes a space of memory and agency rather than control. This is a politics of drawing as listening, allowing voices to appear within rupture and emotion. Not all grief is spoken.

Where Al Solh’s tent works enact rematriation through collective labour, her drawings enact it through the singularity of individual encounter. Yet both produce the same kind of archive, the same resistance to erasure.

Motif, myths and matrilineal memory

Having examined how Al Solh’s practice reconstitutes belonging through collective making and the testimony of the individual encounter, this section turns to another register in Al Solh’s work: the inherited language of shape and form, a visual and sonic vocabulary that recurs across her work. For Al Solh ornament is not decorative; it is itself a form of testimony and a medium of matrilineal inheritance.

According to the architectural historian Gülru Necipoğlu, ornaments are ‘distinctive markers of identity’ against universalising conceptions of Islamic art.36 Necipoğlu argues that the specific formal language of Islamic ornament cannot be dissolved into a generic ‘Islamic style’ without losing what it actually does: mark a particular cultural identity and history of belonging. For Al Solh, this specificity is the point. The arabesques, birds, vines and cypress trees that recur across her work are not generic; they are markers of a particular West Asian heritage, carrying the memory of places from which her collaborators have been displaced.

The art historian Nada Shabout argues that retrieving Islamic visual languages does not signal a return to the past, but a reclaiming and rearticulation within the rifts between contemporary and historical art for sociological and political reasons.37 Shabout’s framework is essential for understanding Al Solh’s practice: the reappearance of these motifs is not a form of nostalgia but a feminist gesture of reasserting visual epistemologies that have been subdued by colonialism and marginalised by Eurocentric art history. In Al Solh’s work, pre-Islamic, Islamic and contemporary forms are both mnemonic and political, reading as lineage extending from myth to Islamic visual culture to the present.

In A Day is as Long as a Year and I Strongly Believe in Our Right to be Frivolous ornamental flora and fauna reappear like refrains. In A Dance with her Myth 2024 (fig.13) Al Solh transfers this logic to a multimedia installation that reinterprets the story of the abduction of the Phoenician Princess Europa by Zeus, who disguised himself as a bull and carried her away on his back (fig.14). Through drawings, paintings, sculptures, embroideries and video the work challenges traditional depictions of women in mythology and reframes them as empowered figures.

Central to the installation, which incorporates a range of geometric and vegetal motifs specific to Lebanon, such as cedar and olive trees, is a Phoenician ship. Symbolising both connection and passage, the vessel is filled with objects and materials Al Solh remembers from her childhood, such as empty plastic water bottles and metal fishing cages. Such symbols articulate a lineage that connects mythic migration to contemporary women’s migration, recalling both home and the pain of displacement through layered materiality – forming a matrilineal inheritance across centuries.

The exterior of A Day is as Long as a Year is also decorated with elaborate vignettes. Alongside recorded testimonies, the installation emits grieving songs of departure and endurance: songs that are passed from mothers to daughters, extending the ornamental logic into sound. The looping audio comes to function as what might be called acoustic arabesques: just as visual arabesques restate and modulate a formal motif – returning, varying and extending it without closure – the looping sound restates and modulates memory and heritage. Neither the visual pattern nor the sonic refrain resolves into a final statement; both continue, as ornament continues. In this context, the installation’s two registers – the embroidered surface and the soundscape – operate by the same formal logic. Rematriation is enacted not only in what the tent contains but in how it sounds and looks.

In one portrait from I Strongly Believe in Our Right to be Frivolous, a speaker recalls Damascus under snow, an ‘oil heater’ and ‘fava beans’ – sensory details of a lost home. W.J.T. Mitchell’s argument that landscape is not neutral but an artistic expression of culture, showcasing power, identities and aesthetics, is helpful in framing this work.38 The woman’s words conjure this image of a wintry Damascus landscape as an expression of cultural identity – a poetics of absence and the emotions felt through its disappearance. Adornment intermediates between concept and identity, operating as an archive form. Al Solh’s embroideries and drawings participate in this lineage, converting inherited ornaments into vehicles for affective knowledge that combat erasure.

Through the assemblage of pattern and sound, Al Solh’s work enacts what the feminist theorist Tina Campt describes as ‘felt sound’ – a manner of listening to and recording history through imagery and photography with intention.39 In A Day is as Long as a Year, felt sound names what the looping audio achieves: it is not accompaniment but argument, not background but structure. The songs and voices that fill the tent are felt before they are understood, reaching the visitor through the same channels as the embroidered surfaces. The connection between present and mythical migration in A Dance with her Myth and the grieving songs in A Day is as Long as a Year manifest Said’s idea of the ‘unhealable rift’ of exile.40 It offers a partial restitution of displaced women’s agency and loss through shared resonance and voices.

Here affective rematriation operates at the deepest level, the level of form itself. The inherited visual and sonic language of arabesques, refrains, birds and lullabies is how belonging is transmitted across generations without a territory. Ornament is the medium of matrilineal inheritance when land and law are unavailable. To stitch a motif passed down through generations, to loop a song sung from grandmothers to daughters, are acts of rematriation. In Al Solh’s work, the return or recovery articulated by Pieski and other decolonial artists is enacted through the very materials and forms of West Asian culture, passed on not through territory but through thread, voice and ornament.

Conclusion

Affective rematriation names a practice in which memories of everyday life – thread, paper, sound, ornament – become the medium of belonging when legal and political channels are closed. It is not a consolation for the absence of return, but a different kind of return entirely: enacted not through land, citizenship or legal restitution, but through collaboration, care and the inherited language of form.

Across A Day is as Long as a Year, I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous and A Dance with her Myth, Al Solh transforms fabric, paper and voice into storytelling and continuity. Thread becomes a medium of communication; the tent is a site of assemblage; the recording a reclaiming of agency; and the page a surface of memory. Ornament, repetition and sound transform remembrance into cultural endurance: rematriation as affective return.

The result is what might be called a feminist topography of memory: a terrain shaped not only by the artist’s relational tracing of names, places and testimonies, but by the material environment through which these memories are encountered spatially and bodily. This topography has no fixed coordinates. It shifts as the tent is dismantled and reinstalled, as the drawings accumulate and as the songs are heard by new audiences. Its permanence is affective, not geographic.

Al Solh’s aesthetics of tenderness fights erasure in contexts of displacement and forced migration. Her tents, drawings and films operate as polyphonic archives in which the personal and political merge. In this sense, her practice offers a redefinition of rematriation: not as the restitution of land, but as a recurrent return to affective connection and shared cultural inheritance – Islamic ornament, oral tradition and women’s embroidery. It is a homecoming not to ‘origin’ but to connection and reconnection.

As Said writes, exile creates an ‘unhealable rift’, a wound that cannot be closed by art, or by anything else. Al Solh does not claim to heal it. Instead her practice demonstrates that this rift can be inhabited, that it can become a site of making, of testimony and of collective belonging. In doing so, it keeps open the question of what return might mean, and who has the right to it.