Who Rotates Around Whom
Salwa Aleryani uses the shifting materialities of her objects as negotiations with, and ultimatums to, histories.
Ten years ago.
Ten earth rotations around the sun.
On the rooftop that faces the view in this photograph, I spent time sun-printing and bleaching diagrams of generators I had collected from manuals—generators that had flooded the market after months of blackouts.
I called them Letters to the Sun.
Of all the plans that I had conceived at the time, responding to and conversing with the energy infrastructure, Letters to the Sun were the first to face the sun.
I had overheard my mother on the phone during the daytime saying,
مافيش ضوء
There is no light —meaning electricity.
And that was when the work occurred to me.
Soon after, I left that place, leaving some of the letters behind. In another geography, the sun and the light seemed different.
Materially, candle wax accumulated daily.
It pooled on tables and sills. To pass the time, we reimagined their residue.
One day, I took a candle to the rooftop and left it in the sun.
I called it
Like using a candle to look for the sun
To start anew is to still be haunted.
For years I felt that way about this unfinished work.
I tried to imagine it in different ways, but it never felt true to its beginnings.
It could not be transplanted elsewhere.
It came close enough in 2021 as part of a public exhibition named RETURN.
Like the exhibition that was returning to a site it had inhabited at various intervals between 2006-10, I too was returning.
The title of the work, Let us remember that these windows open to the west, was borrowed from the book Exchanges on Light by Jacques Roubaud, translated into English by Eleni Sikelianos.
The exchanges in this book take place over six nights. On each night, six fictional characters come together in a dialogue on the nature and essence of light. The quotation below comes from the first night’s dialogue.
The description of the landscape was not one I could identify with, but the description of retiring light felt familiar. In a way it was fitting. At the time, I was creating a work for a place in the centre of Berlin, an area that was first razed by bombing in World War II and then became part of the “no man’s land” along the Berlin Wall. Following the reunification of Germany in 1990, it remained unused for many years. Today, it is entirely built up, except for one small patch of overgrown wasteland.
The text captured how I related to the now-urban landscape and its history. The landscape described was different, but the words still spoke of light. Also, the viewpoint—in this case, the view to the West—was something that I, coming from the East, was preoccupied with.
As the August days got warmer, the wax figures of Let us remember that these windows open to the west melted under the sun’s heat, the same sun that had melted the candle on the rooftop — but here its energy was with a capital E.
It is mainly women (often racialized and othered) who bear the brunt of energy failures.
For those sitting on the ruins of growth, there is an urgent need to remedy these shortcomings, to resist and refuse extractive, heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial systems, to re-invent and redistribute by other means.
Let us remember that these windows open to the west consists of two solar-oven-like structures that host a series of wax sculptures. The wax shapes were cast from elements found in the surrounding area and left inside the oven to melt.
The reflective surfaces that directed the sun rays onto the wax casts also held up a mirror to the sky and neighboring buildings and trees. Walking around the sculptures opened up different perspectives or illusions, offering the possibility of seeing the present in a new way.
The gradual melting of the wax casts under the sun invited viewers to experience the surroundings and conditions in a different light: to imagine new forms of alchemy and photosynthesis, or time flowing through the process in a way that is more attuned to the rhythm of everyday life.
Let us remember that these windows open to the west was an attempt to engage feminist imaginaries around energy solidarity: to consider cooking as a transformative communal space, a place of women’s historical resistance and struggle, across geographies.
It embodied an unmediated harvest of the sun, one that was not expected to act as storage, but rather present a temporality that allows for contingencies.
