Can you inherit other people’s memories? Can you interpret their light, smells, moods as your own?
Does the inscription of memory begin as soon as you open your eyes? Can you feel nostalgic for something you didn’t live through nor experience? These are just a few existential questions surrounding this project that is rooted in my family history in Senegal. I was born in Dakar in 1983, but my parents left when I was six months old, so I am discovering their recollections of this place. The house where they lived, the hospital where I was born, my father’s office, my sister’s school… There is an air here that I feel I remember, though I did not smell or breathe it when I was fully conscious yet. The wind, the temperature, the trees; it is as if I lived it, I experienced it, or did I imagine these memories through family photographs, home videos, told and retold stories? But my eyes, my skin and my nose don’t lie. Or do they?
The gardener who worked for our family is still here, he has been here for almost forty years. My father was the first to hire him. He is tending to a garden that no one needs, an empty house. But nevertheless he continues to make sure the plants and trees are taken care of. The flowers that my father planted are in full bloom, as if to wait for his arrival.

In this lecture-performance, I will recount these thoughts alongside images and videos that juxtapose the past and the present, exhibiting the paradox of memory as a nuanced, imaginary and melancholic phenomenon.

About Monira Al Qadiri
Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Dakar, Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption. She is also a founding member of the artist collective GCC.