Naela El Assaad: Gathering Dust
All Images: Naela El Assaad, from the series Gathering Dust, Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Artist.
With text by Dalia Hashim, writer, editor, and linguist focused on narratology and creative expressions of sociocultural pathologies.
This series marks something of a journey inwards, an ever-sentimental quest for a connection to one’s roots. Naela’s story is not an unfamiliar one. Many Middle Eastern families left their homes in search of brighter futures for their children. In Naela El Assaad’s case, this future brought her back to the place that her father’s family had left decades ago.
El Assaad visited Lebanon, her father’s country of birth, for the first time in 2010. Her series, Gathering Dust (2010), is a documentation of the family home she visited while there: a stately property that had been abandoned in 1975. Untouched since then, it looked as though it were preserved as a time capsule, the floors coveredin dust and the furniture and belongings all seeming to have lived a life filled with stories to tell of what they had seen since left behind. The halls, whispering memories of secrets never to be told.
Although she was born in the South of France in 1980, El Assaad could not obtain French citizenship as neither of her parents were French. She was given her father’s Lebanese nationality and lived between Europe and America where she studied and worked for twenty-six years. After years of perpetual visas and an eight year interlude at the bottom of a pile in the US immigration system, El Assaad was told to take voluntary leave to wait outside the US for her impending Green Card. She was sent to Lebanon, her “country of origin,” a place she had never been before, leaving all she knew behind—the comfort of her home and family, and her belongings, as her own family had done many years ago.
Feeling somewhat displaced, she took comfort amongst the abandoned items and rooms filled with her family’s photos and belongings, each one taking on its own identity, like a family member in an old photo album. The rooms, though void of physical life, felt alive with the history they held. Frozen in time, gathering dust.
