Photo by Dora Denerak Galyas
Nour Shantout
29 April 2022, Annenstrasse 53,
Nour Shantout presented her project ‘Searching for the New Dress’. She unraveled the different layers of the research process and spoke about the challenges she faces when working as a researcher in an over-researched place such as Shatila camp. The talk also addressed counter-mapping as a way of resistance and how the camp as a counter-zone for social struggle connects different ‘traditions of the oppressed’, and their different experiences.
“Searching for the New Dress is a research-based project that looks at Palestinian embroidery in Shatila, a Palestinian camp in Lebanon. It explores how embroidery is influenced by the migration of Syrian Palestinian and Syrian women who took refuge there after the war in Syria. To create ‘New Dresses’ that reflect the socio-political, economic and demographic changes in the embroiderer’s life in the aftermath of the Syrian revolution, I learned to design new motifs and types of stitches which are usually associated with Syrian and Palestinian embroidery. The research also involves interviews with embroiderers in various embroidery centers in Shatila, identifying designs that reflect the changes in Palestinian embroidery. The project asks, what if a ‘New Dress’ emerges after the Syrian revolution, the destruction of the Yarmouk camp –the capital of the Palestinian diaspora–, and the displacement of thousands of Syrians? What would it look like? Which fabric, colours, threads and techniques would be used? Which political slogans and maps would it have?”
Nour Shantout is an artist and researcher. She received the Helen EL Khal prize(2014). She is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. She works around subjugated heritage, counter-memory, counter-history, labour and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective.
