Memories establish a connection between personal and collective past, heritage and history. They give shape to identity that has been fragmented by displacement and life in exile. There are over 6 million Palestinians living in diaspora; most were displaced or expelled over the past 68 years by war and occupation. When a people’s history, culture and existence are being altered, erased or appropriated, holding onto their memories and creating their own historical record, as Edward Said called it, "Permission to Narrate", is empowering and can be seen as an act of resistance.
Guided by artists Jacqueline Reem Salloum and Suhel Nafar, in 2016 ten graduate students in New York City interviewed and documented the oral histories from six Palestinian individuals, each with a different experience of diaspora, each with vivid memories of Palestine. The resulting videos (viewable in the pages that follow) are highlights of these personal histories. The interviews were shared with several artists, most of them also Palestinian, who then transformed the memories into pieces of art. The artists never met the interviewees and were only given the edited videos via internet. The process of creating MEMORY METAMORPHOSIS carried the complexities of gaps across time, space and language and can be seen as a symbolic and metaphoric reflection of the way in which memory works, how national narratives are transmitted and passed down or how art is inspired.