┐ Vies possibles et imaginaires └

© Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh & Rozenn Quéré, from the project Vies possibles et imaginaires

“This is the story of four strong and feisty women, exiled to the four corners of the globe; four Palestinian-Lebanese sisters who have travelled through the history of the twentieth century.
It is a story somewhere between documentary and fiction, biography and drama, based on family photographs, interviews – both actual and imagined events.
Several gatherings, sifting and listening made stories and words emerge, that were then recreated in the present in the most vivid way possible by combining the inner experiences of these women to the lived experience of the gatherings. Herein is a reinterpretation of reality tinged with tenderness and humour. The four women’s and the authors’ imagination is at the core of this work.
Jocelyn, the eldest sister, lived in Cairo. Frieda, the youngest, went into exile to Paris. Stella left Lebanon at the time of the civil war for New York, and her twin Graziella is the only one who has remained in Beirut.
This story called into play images of invented memories, and sometimes defective memories brought up a doubt of what was invented, the memories or the photographs?
Far from being a factual portrayal of Graziella and her sisters, ‘Vies possibles et imaginaires’ is an attempt to translate the eccentricities and the imagination of these women so as to give their imaginings the same status as reality. In other words, combining old family photographs and text did not aim at writing their story, but at writing their myth.” source: Chobi Mela

© Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh & Rozenn Quéré, from the project Vies possibles et imaginaires

“In the opening pages of John Berger’s A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe, which he produced with the photographer Jean Mohr, Berger tell us this story:
A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ‘Did you come by photography or by train?’ All photographs are a form of transport and an absence of expression?
While Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré’s Vies possibles et imaginaires discusses absence and separation, but even more so transportation, across land, sea and air, but also emotional and visual transportation. Indeed, the work is a family album disguised as a piece of theatre (or vice-versa) based on the stories, memories and fantasies of four sisters who were each in turn exiled from, took refuge in, and emigrated to the Middle East, Europe and the United States, starting in the 1940s until today.” written by Miriam Rosen

More of the work can be seen here